@mblarsen/pi-message-jump

Jump the fullscreen transcript to the previous or next message.

Pi already jumps between prompts with tui.altScreen.previousPrompt and nextPrompt (ctrl+shift+up / ctrl+shift+down on macOS and Linux). Those jumps land on OSC 133 zone starts, and an assistant block only emits that zone when the turn made no tool calls. Replies produced while tools run, and the final reply after a steer, are therefore skipped.

This extension does its own row maths over the live transcript component tree, so it lands on every message, and it lands on the text rather than on the top of the message. Turns that only thought or only called tools have no reply to read, so they are not stops. Your own prompts are stops as well: in a tool-heavy session most assistant turns carry no prose, and the prompts are what give the jumps a readable cadence. Nothing is re-rendered, copied, or duplicated: it scrolls the transcript you already have.

Install

pi install npm:@mblarsen/pi-message-jump

Restart Pi, or run /reload.

Usage

| Key | Command | Effect | | --- | --- | --- | | ctrl+shift+k | /jump prev | Jump to the previous message | | ctrl+shift+j | /jump next | Jump to the next message |

/jump also carries context and debug. Type a space to list the subcommands, and context followed by a space to list common settings. The letters p, n, c and d are accepted as shorthands:

| Command | Effect | | --- | --- | | /jump | Show the usage line and the current context | | /jump context | Show the current setting | | /jump context 2/3 | Two thirds of the viewport (default) | | /jump context 1/2 | Half of the viewport | | /jump context 5 | Five rows of context | | /jump context 0 | Message at the very top | | /jump debug | Write the transcript state the jumps can see |

An unknown subcommand, or an argument a subcommand does not take, prints the usage line instead.

Both keys work in fullscreen mode (tuiMode: fullscreen). In regular mode the terminal owns the scrollback, so there is nothing to jump and the extension says so. The commands exist for terminals that intercept the key combinations.

Jumping stops follow-tail: new output does not pull the view back to the bottom while you read. ctrl+end returns to the bottom and resumes following.

A jump puts the message's first line two thirds of the way down the screen, so the tail of what came before it stays visible as context. Change that with /jump context.

Navigation is measured from the message you are on, not from the viewport top. That keeps the message you just read from being picked again, and it reaches a message that sits inside the context band above it. That also holds when pi clamps a jump at the end of the transcript, where it lands above the row the extension asked for. Move the view yourself and the jumps fall back to measuring from the viewport top.

From inside a long reply, ctrl+shift+k scrolls to that reply's opening line, and the next press moves to the message before it. Thinking blocks above the text are skipped, so the first visible row is the reply itself.

How many stops there are depends on the transcript. A session that runs tools for a while produces many assistant turns with thinking and tool calls but no prose; those turns are not stops, so a jump can cover a lot of rows. The stops you can count on are the prompts and the turns that ended in text.

Limits

Run /jump debug to see what the extension can see: how many stops it found, where the viewport sits, and every row it would stop at. Pi hides footer notifications while the transcript is scrolled up, so the same report is written to /tmp/pi-message-jump-debug.json together with the last 20 jumps. That file is the thing to send with a bug report.

The extension walks Pi's transcript components, which have no public scrolling API. Assistant components are recognised by behaviour (lastMessage.role and updateContent) and prompts by their text plus rebuild members, not by class name, and every step is defensive: when a Pi release moves these internals, the shortcut reports that it cannot find the transcript instead of throwing.