header

Replaces pi's built-in startup header (logo + keybinding hints) with a framed two-column box: greeting, block π and session facts on the left, tips and the release's headlines on the right.

╭─ pi v0.83.0 ──────────────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│                afternoon, Guy                 │ Tips for getting started                                             │
│                                               │ /model switches model mid-session                                    │
│                 ████████████                  │ /tree browses this session's branches                                │
│                  ██     ██                    │                                                                      │
│                  ██     ██                    │ ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── │
│                  ██     ██                    │ What's new in 0.83.0                                                 │
│                  ██     ██▄                   │ Credential export for external clients                               │
│                                               │ Headless OpenRouter sign-in                                          │
│                kimi-k3 · high                 │                                                                      │
│           ~/projects/pi-extensions            │ /changelog for more                                                  │
╰───────────────────────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

The greeting name is resolved once at startup from, in order: PI_HEADER_NAME, git user.name, then the OS username — first token, capitalized. What's new is read from the installed pi's CHANGELOG.md and drops out silently if that read fails. Tips rotate by the day.

The frame, title and π are the only colored parts, and they take PI_HEADER_COLOR rather than a theme token — brand color in one place, so the theme itself can stay neutral. Everything inside the box uses theme colors.

Widths adapt: the box caps at 120 columns rather than stretching, stacks to one column below 80, and falls back to the plain glyph-and-greeting header below 46.

Requires quietStartup: false in your settings. setHeader is a no-op when the built-in header is silenced, so with quietStartup: true you would see nothing.

Install

pi install npm:@guygrigsby/pi-header

Config

• PI_HEADER_NAME — name used in the greeting (else git user.name, else OS user).
• PI_HEADER_COLOR — frame, title and π as #rrggbb (default #ff4fa3). Anything that isn't a hex color falls back to the theme's accent.

Test

npm test

Covers the pure layout and parsing in extensions/header-core.mjs: column fitting, frame drawing, changelog extraction, path shortening. The setHeader wiring is exercised by running pi.