¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Today I learned: pi can keep its editor and footer at the bottom of the terminal with fullscreen TUI mode, similarly to Claude Code.

The regular mode leaves terminal scrollback in charge. The --tui-mode option switches to a viewport managed by Pi:

% pi --help | rg -- '--tui-mode|TUI mode'
  --tui-mode <mode>              TUI mode: regular (default) or fullscreen

For an one-off session:

% pi --tui-mode fullscreen

For a persistent default, add tuiMode to ~/.pi/agent/settings.json:

diff --git pi/.pi/agent/settings.json pi/.pi/agent/settings.json
index 7d2fee8b..57fd5094 100644
--- pi/.pi/agent/settings.json
+++ pi/.pi/agent/settings.json
@@ -41,6 +41,7 @@
   "showCacheMissNotices": true,
   "theme": "catppuccin-mocha",
   "treeFilterMode": "user-only",
+  "tuiMode": "fullscreen",
   "warnings": {
     "anthropicExtraUsage": false
   }

The transcript scrolls inside Pi. The editor, queued messages, widgets, and footer stay docked at the bottom.

The same setting is available under /settings as TUI mode. Pi 0.84.4 supports regular and fullscreen.

Fullscreen mode also owns mouse selection. Dragging with the primary mouse button copies the selected text on release by default:

{
  "fullscreenCopyOnSelect": true
}

Pi confirms the copy with a reverse-video Copied! flash in the top-right corner for one second, which is quite easy to miss. ∎