@qcts33/pi-herdr-editor

A pi package that opens a sibling Herdr pane hosting an external editor for composing a message to the agent — a non-blocking analogue of pi's built-in Ctrl+G, which keeps the agent's output visible while you write.

How it works

Invoking /herdr-editor (or alt+g):

1. Splits the current Herdr pane and waits for the new shell to become ready.
2. Runs a probe that prints a start marker through the same printer the sentinel uses, and waits for it with a bounded timeout: if it never arrives — a pane shell that cannot run the command — the cycle fails with an error notification quoting the pane instead of waiting forever.
3. Runs $VISUAL/$EDITOR on a temp file seeded with the current input-box content, through the shell's own eval so a malformed editor command cannot suppress the sentinel.
4. Waits (indefinitely) for a unique sentinel printed after the editor exits.
5. Places the edited text back into pi's input box — not submitted; press Enter to send, inheriting pi's normal busy/idle handling.

The pane is closed when the compose cycle ends. Content that trims to empty cancels, leaving the input box unchanged. Outside Herdr it degrades to pi's built-in external-editor dialog.

The compose pane's shell is detected from the pane's own process, so PowerShell (pwsh, powershell) and POSIX shells (sh, bash, zsh, fish, …) work regardless of platform — Herdr's terminal.default_shell decides. A pane running a shell the extension cannot print through (nushell, cmd.exe, …) falls back to the fullscreen dialog instead of hanging.

Install

pi install npm:@qcts33/pi-herdr-editor

Requires HERDR_ENV=1 (running inside Herdr) for the pane flow; otherwise the fullscreen fallback is used.

License

MIT