pi-sidebar-panel

A standalone pi-coding-agent extension that renders a live right-side sidebar panel in the TUI, showing your current Todos, Sub-agents, LSP servers and MCP servers at a glance.

Features

• Todos — mirrors the agent's active todo tool state (pending / in-progress / completed), synced from tool_result events and replayed from the session branch on start.
• Sub-agents — live tracking of running, done and failed sub-agents with elapsed time, fed by @tintinweb/pi-subagents EventBus events and persisted session records. Done agents render dim + strikethrough.
• LSP — lists the language servers from .pi/lsp.json (or ~/.pi/agent/lsp.json) and whether each server binary is available on PATH.
• MCP — lists the MCP servers from mcp.json (or ~/.pi/agent/mcp.json) and whether each server process is currently running.

Requirements

• pi >= 0.83.0.

Dependencies by section

| Section | Requires install | Requires config | Notes | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Todos | none | none | mirrors the agent's todo tool — empty until used | | Sub-agents | @tintinweb/pi-subagents via pi install | none | EventBus events + session replay; section idle without it | | LSP | none | .pi/lsp.json or ~/.pi/agent/lsp.json | PATH check | | MCP | none | mcp.json or ~/.pi/agent/mcp.json | pgrep running check |

Configuration

lsp.json

The LSP section reads a servers object from the project file .pi/lsp.json, falling back to the global ~/.pi/agent/lsp.json (project wins when both exist). Each entry's command is checked for availability on PATH.

{
  "servers": {
    "typescript": { "command": "typescript-language-server" },
    "go": { "command": "gopls" },
    "python": { "command": "pyright-langserver", "args": ["--stdio"] }
  }
}

Only the command field is used by this panel; other fields (e.g. args) are ignored by the panel's display. If no lsp.json is found, the section shows (no config).

mcp.json

The MCP section reads an mcpServers object from the project file mcp.json, falling back to the global ~/.pi/agent/mcp.json (project wins when both exist). For each entry it derives a process name from command (the basename) and runs pgrep -f to show the server as running or stopped.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "filesystem": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "@modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem"] },
    "github": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "@modelcontextprotocol/server-github"] }
  }
}

If no mcp.json is found, the section shows (no config).

Installation

With the pi package manager:

pi install npm:@aiwayds/pi-sidebar-panel

Or add "npm:@aiwayds/pi-sidebar-panel" to the packages array in ~/.pi/agent/settings.json and restart pi.

Local development: add the absolute path to this directory (e.g. /path/to/pi-sidebar-panel) to the packages array instead, or run pi -e /path/to/pi-sidebar-panel.

To enable the Sub-agents section, also install @tintinweb/pi-subagents:

pi install npm:@tintinweb/pi-subagents

Usage

The panel auto-starts by default at session start. Control it with the /sidebar command:

| Command | Effect | | --- | --- | | /sidebar | Toggle on/off | | /sidebar on | Enable the panel | | /sidebar off | Disable the panel | | /sidebar status | Show current state |

How it works

• The panel listens to the shared EventBus events subagents:started / subagents:completed / subagents:failed continuously for the whole process lifetime — regardless of whether the panel is visible. Agents that start or finish while the panel is hidden are still captured and appear when it is re-enabled.
• On start, the panel replays persisted subagents:record entries from the session branch, so agents that finished before the panel was enabled are reconstructed (latest record per id wins; a live running entry takes priority over a stale record).
• Done agents render dim + strikethrough. Note that strikethrough (SGR 9) is stripped by tmux/cmux when the terminal terminfo lacks smxx/rmxx — in that case the agent falls back to dim only.
• Live done/error history is pruned after 60 s; replayed (historical) entries are pruned 5 minutes after being shown, so the panel reflects current session activity without growing unbounded.
• The overlay is anchored top-right, non-capturing, and repaints on a 5 s interval (line-diffed, so idle cycles write nothing to the terminal).

Development

npm install
npm test          # regression harness (node test/regression.mjs)
npm run typecheck # tsc --noEmit

License

MIT