pi-bar

Never accidentally run Opus on a typo again. pi-bar keeps your model, thinking level, context pressure, a live progress update, and any extension statuses visible in pi's footer.

claude-opus-4.7  ❯  think:med  ❯  2.6% / 1.0M  ❯  Reviewing package structure  ❯  plan:active

Why use it?

• See the active model at a glance — catch accidental model switches before an expensive or sensitive task starts.
• Track thinking level in place — immediately notice when you are using the wrong reasoning setting.
• Watch context pressure early — context usage turns green, yellow, then red as you approach the limit.
• Follow what pi is doing — a one-line progress update keeps the current task visible without scrolling.
• Keep extension statuses visible — statuses other extensions set still appear in the footer.

pi-bar is intentionally tiny: one small extension, no broad behavior changes, and no commands to learn. It replaces pi's built-in footer with a compact model / thinking / context / progress / extension-status line.

Install

pi install npm:pi-bar

If pi is already running after install, reload resources:

/reload

Customization

pi-bar works out of the box, but you can tune it with environment variables before launching pi.

Show or hide segments

PI_BAR_SHOW=model,thinking,context,progress,extensions pi
PI_BAR_SHOW=model,context pi

Allowed segments are model, thinking, context, progress, and extensions. The progress segment stays hidden until pi-bar has a current update. The extensions segment stays hidden when no extension has set a status.

Configure live progress updates

pi-bar shows a short, plain-English description of what pi is working on right now. It refreshes as pi works and resets when you switch branches in the session tree, so stale updates never follow you across tasks. Set PI_BAR_SHOW without progress to hide it.

Pick a specific model for the update by setting the env var or pi settings:

PI_BAR_PROGRESS_MODEL=anthropic/claude-haiku-4-5 pi

Or in pi settings: bar.progressModel. Otherwise pi-bar picks a fast model you are already authenticated with.

Configure extension statuses

Other pi extensions can publish small status badges. Pi-bar collects them into the extensions segment. Run /bar inside pi to pick which ones to show:

/bar

Toggle each status between shown and hidden. The New statuses row controls the default for badges that appear later.

Your choices persist across pi sessions in ~/.pi/agent/pi-bar.json. Override the path with PI_BAR_CONFIG=/some/path.json.

Change context thresholds

PI_BAR_THRESHOLDS=60,85 pi

The first number is the warning/yellow threshold. The second number is the danger/red threshold. Defaults are 70,90.

Pairs well with

• pi-chrome — give your Pi agent your real, signed-in Chrome. Use pi-bar's red-context threshold as the signal to wrap up long browser scrapes before context overflows.
• pi-qq — ask side questions about what the agent just did without polluting the transcript.

Security note

Pi extensions run with your local user permissions. Review any pi package source before installing it.

Progress updates send short snippets of your session activity to the selected model provider. Disable the progress segment with PI_BAR_SHOW if that is not acceptable.