pi-prompt-drafts

A Ctrl+S draft queue for pi's prompt editor, in the style of Claude Code's message handling: set aside the text you are typing without losing it, and get it back at exactly the moment you need it.

Install

pi install npm:pi-prompt-drafts

External contract

Pressing the draft key with text in the editor saves that text as a draft and clears the editor. Pressing the key with an empty editor restores the oldest draft to the editor; it is never sent on its own, only restored for you to review and submit. The drafts form a queue: saving twice keeps both drafts, and restores hand them back in the order they were written.

The moment you send a prompt, the extension restores the oldest draft into the editor automatically -- the sent message becomes the active prompt, and the saved draft becomes the next one to review and submit. The restore fires on each accepted input event, the moment pi dispatches the submitted text, so it happens whether the run was idle or streaming (steering and queued messages included). pi clears the editor before that event dispatches, so the restore lands in an empty editor; if another extension has filled the editor by then, the draft is kept and a notification says it is waiting.

A saved draft that you send verbatim anyway is dropped from the queue (matched exactly against the submitted text), so the auto-restore can never refill the editor with an already-submitted message.

Built-in slash commands are intercepted by pi's editor and never reach the input event, so they cannot trigger the restore directly. The two config selectors are covered through their own events: completing /model (or the scoped-models picker) and /thinking restores the drafts -- but only for an explicit pick, so ctrl+p model cycling and session restores never surface a draft, and a selection with text still in the editor is skipped silently. Extension commands (including /drafts itself) and prompt-template or skill commands behave correctly on their own: extension commands never trigger a restore, and templates and skills are sent as prompts, so they do.

The default key is ctrl+s. pi also binds ctrl+s to app.models.save ("save model selection"), but that binding only does anything inside the model pickers -- they match it directly, so both keep working: in the main editor ctrl+s saves a draft, and inside a picker it still saves the selection as default. pi prints a one-line shortcut-conflict diagnostic at startup anyway; silence it by rebinding the built-in in <agent-dir>/keybindings.json:

{
  "app.models.save": "ctrl+alt+m"
}

app.message.followUp (alt+enter) remains pi's own way to queue a message that is sent when the current run ends; the drafts are only restored into the editor, never sent.

Drafts live in memory for one pi process. A session_start clears the queue, so drafts do not follow you into a resumed or new session. pi's editor API exposes the text but not the cursor position, so a restored prompt lands with the cursor at the end of the text. /drafts restores like the key does, and /drafts clear discards every saved draft.

Settings

Set key in pi-prompt-drafts.json in the Pi agent settings directory, or use PI_PROMPT_DRAFTS_KEY:

For example:

{
  "key": "ctrl+shift+s"
}

Valid modifiers are ctrl, alt, shift, and super. Valid named keys are enter, escape, tab, space, backspace, delete, up, down, left, right, home, and end.

If the contract is unmet

An invalid key uses ctrl+s and shows one warning. A restore with a non-empty editor keeps the draft and says so instead of overwriting your text. Whitespace only editor text counts as empty. Pressing the key with an empty editor and an empty queue says so and changes nothing. One-shot built-in commands that do not end in a selection -- /new, /export, /compact, and their kin -- do not surface the drafts; restore them with the key or /drafts when you want them. Nothing is restored after a send if Pi's editor was not available to the extension; the drafts survive and a later restore still works.