pi-droid-styling

Opinionated Pi UI styling extension: compact startup UI, boxed editor, cleaner tool tags, message prefixes, footer stats, and reload-safe render patches.

Screenshot

Install

pi install git:github.com/sting8k/pi-droid-styling

For project-local install:

pi install -l git:github.com/sting8k/pi-droid-styling

Features

• Compact startup header and loaded resources table.
• Boxed editor with selectable userZoneStyle presets and adjusted TUI padding.
• Cleaner assistant/user message spacing and prefixes.
• Compact tool tags with badges, elapsed time, and dimmed output support.
• Footer stats including token speed and compact session context.
• Optional true fixed user zone that keeps status/widgets/editor/footer at the bottom while chat/feed scrolls above, with mouse selection/copy support, themed bottom-row feedback, and OSC 52 clipboard propagation for terminal proxies.
• Reload/session-safe patches to avoid stacked padding or spacing.

Config

Config is stored at ~/.pi/agent/pi-droid-styling.json:

{
  "alwaysExpanded": false,
  "maxExpandedLines": 50,
  "dimToolOutput": false,
  "customWorkingMessage": {
    "working": "Working",
    "thinking": "Thinking",
    "answering": "Answering",
    "running": "Cooking"
  },
  "userZoneStyle": "gemini",
  "inputBox": {
    "style": "auto"
  },
  "tasksWidgetStyle": "compact",
  "fixedUserZone": false,
  "forceOSC11": false,
  "visibleChatTail": 30
}

Key	Type	Default	Description
alwaysExpanded	bool	false	Initial tool-output expansion state. Pi core Ctrl+O stays authoritative after that.
customWorkingMessage	object	{"working":"Working", ...}	Custom labels for the working/thinking/answering/running loader. Accepts partial objects; legacy true/false auto-normalizes.
userZoneStyle	"gemini" | "droid" | "cli-dock"	"gemini"	Input-zone preset. gemini = compact header/divider/status/halfblock-input/footer layout. droid = boxed legacy layout. cli-dock = opt-in Droid CLI-style bottom dock with a true outlined › prompt box, placeholder, model/context/branch/project status on the left, and MCP/footer status on the right.
inputBox.style	"auto" | "halfblock" | "line" | "solid"	"auto"	Input-frame override. auto = preset default (gemini uses halfblock, droid uses its native boxed layout). solid uses selected-background input plus a bottom padding row without half-block glyphs for terminals with ▀/▄ seams. cli-dock intentionally keeps its outline box even if this is set to line.
fixedUserZone	bool	false	When enabled, status/widgets/editor/footer stay fixed at the bottom while chat/feed scrolls above.
tasksWidgetStyle	"default" | "compact"	"compact"	Tasks sidebar widget style. compact = one-line summary ● Tasks › [N] <current task> · <time> (x/y done · n running) with idle/done/blocked variants; current-task text is truncated to fit while counts are preserved. default = do not patch pi-tasks; leave the upstream widget untouched. Auto-scaffolded into the config file on first load.
forceOSC11	bool	false	Enable OSC 11 terminal background sync on Windows/WSL (off by default).
visibleChatTail	number	30	Number of recent chat UI children to render in long sessions. 0 disables chat virtualization and renders all history. Auto-scaffolded/backfilled into the config file.

Profiling

Render profiling is disabled by default. To capture render/update/git/sidebar metrics plus memory, CPU delta, and event-loop utilization:

PI_DROID_PROFILE=1 PI_DROID_PROFILE_OUT=/tmp/pi-droid-profile.jsonl pi

Useful environment variables:

• PI_DROID_PROFILE=1 enables profiling.
• PI_DROID_PROFILE_OUT=/path/profile.jsonl writes JSONL output. Use stderr or stdout for stream output.
• PI_DROID_PROFILE_INTERVAL_MS=5000 controls summary cadence.

Synthetic self-check:

npm run profile:render

The synthetic bench exercises sidebar rendering, fixed-zone compositor repaint, render throttle, assistant/tool debounce, and git status refresh. Runtime terminal paint/GPU cost still needs a real Pi TUI capture.

Notes

• Works with the active Pi theme; it paints TUI cells explicitly and uses OSC 11 terminal background sync on non-Windows hosts to cover terminal-owned padding/remainder areas. Windows/WSL/Windows Terminal skip OSC 11 unless forceOSC11 is enabled.
• Compatible color schemes: https://github.com/sting8k/pi-themes
• customWorkingMessage is on by default. Set working, thinking, answering, and running strings to customize the themed loader labels.
• Existing legacy customWorkingMessage: true or false values are normalized back to the default label object.

License

MIT