pi-workbench

A personal front door to pi’s existing commands, project context and Git changes. Uses pi’s host-provided widgets: no installed runtime dependencies, model calls or global keybinding changes.

Type to filter immediately; arrows navigate, Enter chooses, Escape cancels. Search requires every word; name matches rank ahead of description matches. There is no 200-match cutoff. Empty results remain searchable. Native Input handles editing, paste and cursor focus; SelectList handles selection. Shortcuts depend on terminal modifier support; slash commands always work.

Commands and drafts

Command choices prepare the slash command in the editor. Press Enter to execute it normally. Built-ins are never passed to sendUserMessage (which would send them to the model instead of opening their native UI).

An existing prompt is backed up as a non-context workbench-draft session entry before replacement. /ui restore swaps it with the current editor text; if the editor is empty, it restores and clears the backup. A second preparation cannot overwrite an existing backup. Reload restores the backup from the active branch, including after tree navigation. Session changes retain it in the original session, not the destination. Normal session retention/privacy rules apply.

Existing session tree/resume, labels, planning, subagent controls, prompts and skills remain their own implementations. Subagents are never enabled by the UI.

Mistyped slash commands

A close misspelling such as /eixt is consumed before reaching the model. The original text and arguments are restored, and a notification suggests /exit. Nothing is autocorrected or executed: edit it and submit again. Prefix it with ordinary text to discuss a literal command instead.

Suggestions use the current extension/prompt/skill registry plus pi 1.4’s built-in names. The guard recognizes one insertion, deletion, substitution or adjacent transposition (and wrong case). It deliberately leaves distant unknown names, paths, slash prose, multiline prompts, RPC/extension input and image-bearing messages alone; images cannot be restored through the editor-text API.

Files and changes

File inventory reuses code-search’s Git-aware inventory and non-Git fallback. In a Git repository it covers the whole repository, including from a subdirectory. Ignored files are omitted; the existing inventory cap is 50,000 paths.

Inserting a reference preserves the prompt and never reads the file or inserts @file (pi would expand that attachment on submission). The model may subsequently read the referenced file when you submit the prompt.

Changes keep staged and unstaged versions separate, including a file changed in both places. Enter opens a non-editable diff directly:

• Up/Down, PageUp/PageDown and Home/End scroll.
• Left/Right move between changes in the filtered list, wrapping at either end.
• e opens the current worktree file in read-only Neovim; return resumes the diff.
• i inserts a file reference and ends the review.
• Escape returns to the list with its query and selected file/scope intact.

Each file/scope keeps its own scroll position for the duration of the review. Scope stays in the header. Diffs disable external diff/textconv drivers and treat filenames literally. Previews are capped at 20,000 characters, explicitly marked when truncated, and terminal control bytes are escaped before display.

Neovim runs nvim -R -- <absolute-path> without a shell, temporarily releasing the TUI. It shows the worktree, not the staged snapshot; read-only mode can still be overridden manually in Neovim.

The workbench is user-invoked and terminal-only. It refuses to open while the agent is busy, avoiding approval/tool-dialog focus theft. No automatic staging, commits, Git mutations, permanent sidebar or Vim emulation.

Verification

From the repository root, run node .pi/verify/workbench.mjs --upgrade and node .pi/verify/workbench.mjs --regular (requires pi, tmux, Neovim and Git). The isolated real-terminal fixture checks live filtering, cancellation, draft recovery, file references, non-editable scoped diffs, retained review position, actual Neovim handoff, /eixt interception, narrow resize, Unicode paths and real agent lifecycle against a local scripted provider. It checks that browsing and typo interception change neither the worktree/index nor call a model. See the repository recipe for the remaining gates.