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Bookmark, search, and resume pi coding-agent sessions with a fast keyboard-driven TUI.
pi --resumelists every session you ever started. After a week that's 50+ entries with no titles, no tags, and no order, so you just scroll and hope. pisesh adds what was missing: ⭐ favorites, instant search, and a[NOW]badge for the session you're attached to.
Real capture: ★ starred session at the top, the rest available behind the Today, Here, and All tabs. Tab cycles. f stars. Enter resumes.
What the TUI looks like, screen by screen. The data below is made up, not real sessions.
Main list. The highlighted row is the current selection, and Tab cycles through the tabs. The green [NOW] badge marks the pi session you launched from, and the cyan ✎ marks a session you renamed yourself. CJK titles stay column-aligned:
e renames a session. The first user prompt makes a poor title for a thread you keep coming back to, so press e to set your own. It's saved as an override (the session jsonl is never touched) and the session gets a ✎ marker in the list:
p re-points the working directory through an arrow-key directory browser. This is the cwd pi actually cds into on resume, and it's also what the Here tab filters on. Press s to lock in the highlighted directory:
The Here tab shows only sessions whose effective cwd matches the directory you launched pisesh from. Inside a project you see just that project's threads, without scrolling past your home-dir scratch sessions.
Pi accumulates sessions across many working directories: your home, several project dirs, scratch tmux panes. The built-in resume picker is roughly alphabetical and forgets context. After a few weeks:
- You can't tell which session was "the one where you fixed the auth bug"
- You can't pin the 3-4 long-running threads you keep going back to
- You re-open the wrong session and pollute it with unrelated context
- You waste time searching by timestamp guessing
pisesh is a single-file Node script (no dependencies, ~900 LoC) that gives you everything pi --resume doesn't.
| Need | What you get |
|---|---|
| Mark important sessions | ⭐ Star/unstar with one keystroke; favorites persist to one global JSON |
| Give a thread a real name | e sets a custom title (marked ✎); overrides the first-prompt label |
| See only the current project's sessions | Here tab filters to sessions whose cwd matches where you launched pisesh |
| Fix where a session resumes | p opens an arrow-key directory browser; sets the cwd pi cds into |
| Find a session by what you said | / searches id + project + first user prompt + custom title |
| Know which session you're attached to | [NOW] badge on the live session (passed from pi via env var) |
| Keep your terminal clean | Alt-screen buffer, so quitting puts your terminal back the way it was (like vim) |
| Read Korean / Chinese / Japanese prompts | Display-width-aware truncation; columns never blow up on CJK |
| Open from anywhere | Run as standalone pisesh shell command, or /sesh inside pi |
| Zero install pain | No build step, no native deps, runs on Node 18+ everywhere |
| Trust it with your history | pisesh writes only two small JSON files (favorites + overrides); session jsonl files are read-only |
# Install both the CLI and the /sesh slash command in one go
pi install npm:piseshThis registers pisesh as a pi extension. Inside any pi session, type /sesh.
npm install -g pisesh
piseshUse this if you want pisesh as a separate shell command and don't need the pi slash binding.
git clone https://github.com/Blue-B/pisesh.git
cd pisesh
npm link # symlink ./bin/pisesh into your global PATH
pisesh --helpPi-extension side: drop extensions/sesh.ts into ~/.pi/agent/extensions/ and run /reload inside pi.
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
↑ ↓ / j k |
move cursor |
Tab / h / l |
switch tab (★ Favorites → Today → Here → All) |
f / Space |
star / unstar the selected session |
Enter |
resume the session; runs pi --session <id> in its (or the overridden) cwd |
e |
edit name: set a custom display title, shown with ✎ in the list |
p |
edit cwd with an arrow-key directory browser; sets the resume / Here dir |
d |
session details (full prompt, file, byte size, timestamps) |
/ |
search by id / project / first user prompt / custom title |
Esc |
clear search first, then quit |
q / Ctrl-C |
quit (terminal restored) |
r |
rescan session files (after pi starts a new session) |
c (in details view) |
copy session id to clipboard (clip.exe / pbcopy / xclip) |
Home End PgUp PgDn |
jump to top / bottom / ±10 |
For scripts and automation:
pisesh --list # print starred session IDs (one per line)
pisesh --json # full favorites file as JSON
pisesh --star <partial-uuid> # star a session from a script
pisesh --unstar <partial-uuid> # unstar
pisesh --help
| Area | Details |
|---|---|
| Runtime | Node.js ≥ 18 (uses only built-in modules: fs, path, os, child_process, readline) |
| TUI rendering | Raw ANSI escape sequences (no blessed / ink / chalk dependency) |
| Alt screen buffer | \x1b[?1049h / \x1b[?1049l, the same primitive vim, less, htop, and droid CLI use |
| Input | Node's readline.emitKeypressEvents in raw mode |
| Width calculation | UAX #11 East Asian Width ranges, compressed to ~10 inline range checks |
| Pi extension | TypeScript factory using @earendil-works/pi-coding-agent extension API (ui.custom, tui.stop) |
| Storage | Two JSON files: ~/.pi/agent/favorites.json (starred ids) + ~/.pi/agent/pisesh-meta.json (per-session title / cwd overrides) |
| Session discovery | Direct filesystem scan of ~/.pi/agent/sessions/<projectSlug>/*.jsonl; first 96 KB parsed |
| Process model | Slash command pauses pi's TUI, spawns pisesh with inherited stdio, restarts pi on exit |
- No
npm installfor the bundled CLI runtime; it's genuinely zero-dependency - No native binaries / GPU / ffmpeg / database
- No network calls, no telemetry, no analytics
- No daemon / background process
| What | Where |
|---|---|
| Favorites | ~/.pi/agent/favorites.json |
| Overrides | ~/.pi/agent/pisesh-meta.json (per-session custom title / cwd, keyed by session id) |
| Sessions | ~/.pi/agent/sessions/<projectSlug>/<timestamp>_<uuid>.jsonl (pi's native layout; pisesh never writes here) |
Favorites file shape:
{
"ids": [
"019e79b9-d2c1-741f-81ea-1dcad9a2d712",
"019e6355-9957-7a30-b4ce-b9db5e3c9ac6"
],
"updated": "2026-05-31T01:33:21.234Z"
}It's a single global file (not per-project). Back it up by syncing one file.
Korean / Chinese / Japanese / fullwidth characters render 2 cells wide in terminals; pisesh measures display width (not JavaScript code-unit length) when truncating and padding. Korean prompts never wrap, columns stay aligned, and the layout looks identical whether the prompt is hello world or 안녕하세요 세상.
✓ webapp 로그인 폼 만들고 인증 엔드포인트 연결…
✓ 가계부앱 이번 달 지출 분석 화면 설계…
✓ docs-site 시작하기 가이드 다시 작성…
(Previously: Korean prompts overflowed to a second line and broke the table.)
- Node.js ≥ 18 (uses optional chaining and
for…ofon strings, so no transpile step) - A terminal with ANSI escape and alternate screen buffer support, which covers basically every modern emulator:
- Windows: Windows Terminal, WezTerm, Alacritty ✅
- macOS: iTerm2, Terminal.app, WezTerm, Alacritty, Kitty ✅
- Linux: GNOME Terminal, Konsole, xterm, Alacritty, Kitty ✅
pion$PATHfor theEnter-to-resume action
git clone https://github.com/Blue-B/pisesh.git
cd pisesh
npm link
npm test # node --check + smoke testBranch from main with a short-lived feature/<scope> or fix/<scope>, then squash-merge back.
Commits: Conventional Commits style (feat:, fix:, docs:, chore:).
Open a PR. The CI matrix runs on Ubuntu, macOS, and Windows across Node 18, 20, and 22.
If pisesh saves you context-switching time or just makes pi nicer to live in, supporting it directly accelerates development:
- Your support helps: bug fixes, new keybindings, more search modes, integration with other pi extensions.
- Transparency: I don't sell data; funds go to development time and a coffee or two.
- One-time sponsors are credited in README and release notes (opt-out available).
- Monthly sponsors ($3/mo via GitHub Sponsors) get best-effort priority triage for "Sponsor Request" issues.
- pi-coding-agent by @mariozechner, the agent and extension API that make
/seshpossible. - interactive-shell example extension, the pattern reference for the
ui.custom+tui.stopTTY handoff. - Inspiration for the favorites + tabs UX: droid CLI and tmux's sesh.
Thanks to everyone who helped make pisesh better 🙏
The pi extension uses the @earendil-works/pi-coding-agent API; check pi's own license for that side. The CLI binary is pure Node and has no other licenses to worry about.