@arvoretech/pi-widget-wrangler 🤠

Round up the widget herd. Every Pi extension can paint a widget above or below your editor with ctx.ui.setWidget(...). Install a few of them and the screen gets noisy fast. Widget Wrangler corrals every widget — from any extension — into one panel where you flip each one shown or hidden.

It is fully generic: it does not know or care which extensions you run. Anything that calls setWidget shows up in the corral automatically.

What it does

• Intercepts ctx.ui.setWidget (the shared UI surface all extensions write to) and keeps a live registry of every widget, keyed by its id.
• A panel (/wrangle or Ctrl+Shift+W) lists every widget it has seen, with a shown / hidden toggle each — same feel as Pi's /mcp panel.
• Hidden widgets are suppressed before they ever reach the screen. Your choices persist globally for your user (saved to ~/.pi/agent/widget-wrangler.json), so the same widgets stay hidden across every chat, reload, and branch. A choice made in one session takes effect in all others.
• It never touches ctx.ui.notify, so error/info notifications from your extensions still pop up and fade on their own — even for a hidden widget.

Usage

• /wrangle — open the corral.
• Ctrl+Shift+W — open the corral (default keybinding, configurable).
• In the panel: arrow keys to move, space/enter to toggle, type to search, esc to close. Changes apply instantly.

Changing the keybinding

The shortcut is a CLI flag, widget-wrangler-key. Override it when launching pi:

pi --widget-wrangler-key=alt+w

Pass an empty value to disable the shortcut entirely and rely only on /wrangle:

pi --widget-wrangler-key=

Note on Alt/Option: alt+* shortcuts are reliable on Linux but depend on terminal configuration on macOS (e.g. iTerm2 needs "Use ⌥ as Meta"). The default ctrl+shift+g is the most portable choice across macOS, Linux, and Windows.

Install

Add it to your Pi extensions (npm package or local). It registers a command and a shortcut; no configuration required.

How it works (and one caveat)

All extensions share a single ctx.ui object, so wrapping setWidget once intercepts every extension's widget calls. A widget appears in the corral the first time its owning extension sets it. Most status widgets re-set themselves every turn, so they show up almost immediately; a widget set exactly once, before this extension loaded, only becomes controllable after its next update.

License

MIT