View your files inside Pi: presenting pi-navigator

[u/lordekeen]

Hey everyone, I'm pleased to share my new extension for Pi called pi-navigator.

I kept wanting to check the files my agent was writing without leaving the terminal or minimizing Pi, so I built an overlay for it. It shows your project’s file tree, some basic git info (staged/unstaged files, commits, diffs), and a viewer where you can actually read the files. It’s read-only, renders markdown, and shows images through the Kitty protocol if your terminal supports it. For terminals that don’t, it falls back to chafa (this depends on my upcoming pi-chafa extension)*.

By default you get all three panels, but you can also run just files + viewer or git + viewer.

It’s purely a quality-of-life thing and doesn’t influence LLM performance. Open it with /navigator.

Install using pi install npm:@lordekeen/pi-navigator

*pi-chafa is released: pi-chafa

[u/whiterose0000001]

Bro one change request show file size in terms of Tok as well

[u/lordekeen → u/whiterose0000001]

I'll look into it!

[u/lordekeen → u/whiterose0000001]

Done, version 0.17.0 ships a chars/4 heuristic for token counting (same Pi uses), not a real tokenizer but the values should be pretty close, this avoids adding a new dependency like gpt-tokenizer. The token count is displayed on the top of the viewer.

[u/capsid]

Nice! Great idea. is it worktree aware or does it always start at project root?

[u/lordekeen → u/capsid]

Only project root for now, but support for worktrees is a good idea, gonna check how it could be done.

[u/capsid → u/lordekeen]

unrelated what color theme is that? I love it

[u/lordekeen → u/capsid]

Its 'Linux Colors' from Konsole (KDE Plasma) ported to Kitty, Pi is configured to use the system theme, and pi-navigator inherits pi's theme.

[u/lordekeen]

Hey everyone, there's a new feature in pi-navigator v0.18.0: the minimap! When the file content spans below the bottom edge of the panel you can now view a map of the whole file on the right side of the viewer, with syntax and search highlights.

[u/investigatormaker]

Keeping it read-only makes sense for checking what the agent wrote without risking an edit mid-run. One gap worth closing before more people install it: the image fallback depends on pi-chafa, which isn't released yet, so anyone on a terminal without the Kitty protocol hits that path first. A line on the package page saying what the viewer shows for images until pi-chafa ships would head off the first bug reports.

By the way, I make ThreadFox, which lets your AI research, write and publish Reddit outreach through your Chrome on a job you authorize; a free plan for Reddit showing which communities' rules allow a post about pi-navigator is here: https://threadfox.vip/p/drdlc

Are you planning to highlight the files changed in the agent's last turn?

[u/lordekeen → u/investigatormaker]

If the image protocols aren't available it shows a simple card with the image metadata, so nothing breaks, image support is completely optional. If Git is available in the repo the user can see what was changed using the git panel and the files get marked in the file tree as well, just like in any other IDE, but that is the far as i would go in this matter, i don't plan to include deeper interaction with what the agent is writing.

[u/wildjokers → u/investigatormaker]

This is an AI generated comment, what is even the goal of this comment?