pi Desktop

A desktop app for the pi coding agent.
The same agent and the same ~/.pi/agent you use in the terminal — with a timeline, Git review, a built-in terminal, and an Android app to keep going from your phone.

English · 简体中文 · Download · Getting started · Adapters

pi Desktop is not another agent. It runs the pi SDK in a background worker and reads the same files as the CLI — sessions, model logins, settings.json, installed extensions. Open a project and the sessions you started in the terminal are already in the sidebar; continue any of them, or start a new one.

_{Recorded from the app itself. The model replies come from a scripted local endpoint so the demo is reproducible; the bash, read and edit tools ran for real on the sample repo.}

Tool calls stream in as flat steps — thinking, commands, reads, edits — and fold into one summary line once the answer starts. Each edit shows +N −M; the turn ends with a Files changed card that opens the file in Files or Review.

Markdown, code blocks, KaTeX and long outputs render in place. Hover a message to copy it, rewind to it, or fork a new session from it.

Pick a scope — this turn, this session, or the whole Git working tree — and expand a file for its diff; drag the sidebar wider for a side-by-side view. Hunks can be staged or unstaged one at a time, and a line comment goes straight back into the conversation.

• Browse the project next to the chat; Ctrl/⌘+click opens a file in another tab.
• The gutter button quotes path:line into the composer as a reference.
• Expand preview gives the file the whole chat column; click again to go back. Drag a file onto the composer to attach it.

• @ searches project files (respects .gitignore, uses fd) and inserts them as references.
• / lists pi's built-in commands and the ones your extensions register.
• Paste or drop images and files; model and thinking level sit at the right of the input.
• While the agent is working, Enter steers the current turn and Alt+Enter queues a follow-up for when it finishes.

Each session runs in its own worker. Start a turn, open another session and start a second one: both keep going, the sidebar marks the ones that are working and the status bar counts them. Settings → General sets how many workers stay alive and when idle ones are reclaimed; running sessions are never reclaimed.

Ctrl+` pulls a terminal up from under the chat, in the current project. It starts the same shell pi runs commands in (Git Bash on Windows) with pi's tools on PATH; + also offers PowerShell 7, Windows PowerShell, cmd, each WSL distribution, zsh or fish. Tabs and up to four side-by-side panes per tab — drag the borders, close one pane with its ✕ or Ctrl+Shift+W. Hiding the drawer keeps the shells and their output; selected output goes into the composer with one click.

The status bar shows the project's branch, uncommitted changes and ahead / behind. Click it (or Switch branch… in the command palette) to search local and remote branches, switch, or create one from HEAD. Changes travel with the switch when Git allows it; when they would be overwritten you can stash them first, and they are offered back when you return to the branch. If a session is still working in the project you are asked before anything changes under it.

Settings → Usage adds up tokens and cost from every pi session on the machine — the desktop's and terminal pi's, including a custom sessionDir — by day, hour, model, project and session. Hover a layer of a day for its share; replies copied into a fork count once.

Light and dark each take a preset — Claude, VS Code Light+, Codex Dark — or your own: colours for the sidebar, chat, your messages, code blocks and borders, a heading / reply font (serif included), chat text size and line height, corner radius and shadow. Everything is a CSS variable, listed next to the custom CSS editor. A background image can sit behind the window — per mode or shared, with its strength, blur and the panes' opacity adjustable; text always stays on a frosted surface. Themes import from pi-theme-v1 / codex-theme-v1 strings; five icon sets and 90–110% density are in Settings → Appearance too.

pi Remote (Android) connects to the desktop app: turn on Settings → Mobile, scan the QR code, and every session is on the phone — read along while a turn runs, answer its questions, send prompts with images, pick the model and thinking level. Review a turn's changes or the working tree file by file, long-press lines to leave comments that go into your next message, switch the session's branch or fork from any message. The connection is end-to-end encrypted and stays on your network; away from home, put both devices in the same Tailscale / ZeroTier / WireGuard network (the app finds the overlay address, or add one by hand). English and Chinese follow the phone's language, with an in-app override.

The renderer never talks to the SDK directly: the main process routes each request to the worker that owns the session, and that worker runs the pi SDK on your machine or inside a WSL distribution. Sessions, logins and settings stay in ~/.pi/agent, so the CLI and the app can take turns on the same session.

Get them from Releases; each release lists SHA-256 checksums in SHA256SUMS.txt. The app bundles its own pi SDK; you only need to sign in to a model provider once, the same way you do for terminal pi (the credentials live in ~/.pi/agent). Settings → Runtime can switch to a globally installed pi version.

git clone https://github.com/justhil/pi-app.git
cd pi-app
npm install
npm run dev          # development
npm run build        # production bundle in out/
npm run package      # installers via electron-builder

1. Open folder — the folder becomes the agent's working directory. For a throwaway chat, use + next to Conversations instead.
2. Pick a session — sessions from terminal pi for that folder are listed; + next to the project starts a new one.
3. Send — Enter sends, Shift+Enter adds a line.
4. Look right — Review, Run, Context, Tree and Files share the right sidebar; drag its edge to make it wider.
5. Go back — hover a message to rewind or fork, or press Esc twice in an empty composer to open the session tree.

Install and enable extensions exactly as for terminal pi:

pi install npm:<package>      # or: pi install git:github.com/<owner>/<repo>

then make sure the package is enabled in ~/.pi/agent/settings.json → packages and start a new session. Settings → Extensions shows what the current worker loaded; Settings → Adapters holds each adapter's desktop options. To override or add an adapter, put a .json adapter file in ~/.pi/desktop/adapters/ (or <project>/.pi/desktop/adapters/, which takes precedence) — see the authoring guide.

Questions and feedback: LinuxDo or GitHub Issues. If the app is useful to you, a ⭐ helps other pi users find it, and you can sponsor maintenance with the QR code below.

MIT