pi-click-model

Click the badges in Pi's footer to switch models and thinking levels — with the mouse.

 ↑1.2k ↓300 $0.012 · 42% ctx      click to switch · right-click for next  ⟨anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-5⟩ ⟨think: high⟩

The badges sit at the bottom right — the thinking level flush with the edge and the model badge just inside it — while the token/cost summary stays on the left. Model and thinking level are separate clickable targets, each with its own picker.

Pi's built-in /model selector is keyboard-only: its list component has no mouse handler, so in the fullscreen TUI a click on a model row does nothing. This extension replaces the footer with clickable badges and opens pickers that work with both mouse and keyboard.

Install

# from npm
pi install npm:pi-click-model

# local checkout
pi install /path/to/pi-click-model

# or for a single run without installing
pi -e /path/to/pi-click-model/index.ts

# or symlink it into your user extensions directory
ln -s "$PWD" ~/.pi/agent/extensions/pi-click-model

Use

Both pickers support ↑/↓ (or j/k), enter to select, esc to cancel, and typing to fuzzy-search. ctrl+u clears the search. Mouse wheel, click, and drag behave as expected in the list. The picker opens with the current model / level preselected.

Right-clicking anywhere in the picker dismisses it — on a row, on the title or hint lines, or on the blank space beside the list — and that click never falls through to the transcript underneath.

Thinking levels come from the same rules as Pi's built-in selector: models without reasoning only offer off, a null entry in thinkingLevelMap hides a level, and xhigh/max appear only when the model maps them explicitly.

Requirements

• Pi Coding Agent >= 1.0.0 (@earendil-works/pi-tui >= 0.85 for component mouse dispatch).
• Fullscreen TUI for mouse input. This is Pi's default; if you switched to the regular TUI (tuiMode: "regular" in /settings), the badges are still rendered but the terminal owns the mouse and no click reaches Pi — use alt+m / alt+t, the /click-model and /click-thinking commands, or Pi's built-in ctrl+l instead.

How it works

• ctx.ui.setFooter() installs a one-line component that renders the token/cost summary on the left and packs the badges in from the right edge (thinking level outermost, then the model), recording each badge's column range while rendering.
• In the fullscreen renderer, Pi hit-tests every layout box and forwards normalized mouse events to the component under the pointer, including components that have no layout node of their own (this footer). A badge claims a left/right press so the release is routed back to it as a click.
• Pickers are overlays built from @earendil-works/pi-tui's SelectList (which ships its own handleMouse) plus a fuzzy filter, so mouse and keyboard both work. Pi renders an overlay as an opaque rectangle, so the picker spans the full terminal width while keeping its content in a right-hand column: that keeps the list next to the badges that were clicked and still captures clicks on the blank space beside it, which dismiss the picker on right click. The left padding is excluded from hit-testing, since Container dispatches mouse events by row only.
• Switching calls pi.setModel() / pi.setThinkingLevel(); nothing is written to settings.json, so the session changes without touching your configured defaults. thinkingLevelMap is read from the model registry to list only the levels the current model accepts.

Narrow terminals

Badges are packed from the right edge inward, so the thinking badge owns the outermost column and the model badge sits just inside it. As width shrinks, the click hint is dropped first, then the thinking badge gives way so the model badge can take the right edge, and the left summary drops one segment at a time (↑… ↓…, $…, ctx %). Only when the model badge alone no longer fits is it truncated — and then clicking is disabled, so there is never a click target you cannot see.

Limitations

• Only one extension can own the footer. Installing this alongside another footer-replacing extension means the last one loaded wins.
• Model list content comes from ctx.modelRegistry.getAvailable(), so only models with working credentials appear.

Development

npx -p typescript tsc -p tsconfig.json   # typecheck against a local Pi install

tsconfig.json maps the two Pi packages to the paths of the locally installed coding agent; adjust them if your Pi lives elsewhere.

License

MIT