pi-tmux-status

Show pi panel status (idle / working / asking) as colored icons in the tmux status bar.

How it works

Each pi instance writes its current state to /tmp/pi-tmux-{pane_id}.txt. A companion shell script (auto-installed to ~/.config/tmux/pi-status.sh) reads these files and renders colored icons next to each tmux window name.

Icons

Icon	Color	State	Meaning
○	grey	idle	pi is waiting for user input
●	yellow (blinking)	working	pi is processing (LLM streaming / running tools)
●	red	asking	pi is waiting for user response (interactive tool or question)

Only panes with a running pi instance show an icon. Panes without pi are hidden.

Installation

pi install npm:pi-tmux-status

Setup

Add these lines to ~/.tmux.conf:

set -g status-interval 1
set -g window-status-format         " #I:#W#(~/.config/tmux/pi-status.sh #{window_id}) "
set -g window-status-current-format " #I:#W*#(~/.config/tmux/pi-status.sh #{window_id}) "

Reload tmux:

tmux source-file ~/.tmux.conf

Reload pi (or restart):

/reload

The shell script is auto-generated by the extension on startup, so you don't need to create it manually.

Requirements

• tmux 3.2+
• Running inside tmux ($TMUX_PANE must be set)
• A terminal that supports 256 colors and blinking text

How states are detected

State	Trigger
idle	agent_end fires and last assistant message has no question
working	agent_start fires (LLM is streaming or tools are executing)
asking	An interactive tool (e.g. ask_user_question) is executing, OR agent_end fires and the last assistant message contains a question (?)

To add more interactive tools, edit the INTERACTIVE_TOOLS set in the extension source.

License

MIT