gentle-quick-peek

Peek at a file without leaving your Pi / Gentle Shell session. Ported from midudev's Claude Code quick-peek plugin to the Pi extension API.

From the current session transcript (or from an explicit argument), a file path can be inspected in place: a code file shows numbered, syntax-highlighted lines with the :N line illuminated; an image shows an inline thumbnail when the terminal supports it; and every preview shows name, type, size and age.

Install

pi install npm:gentle-quick-peek
# or, from Gentle Shell:
gentle-shell install npm:gentle-quick-peek

Usage

Install

Gentle Shell:

gentle-shell install npm:gentle-quick-peek

Pi:

pi install npm:gentle-quick-peek

Without installing, from a checkout of this repository:

pi -e ./packages/quick-peek/extensions/quick-peek.ts

Examples

Both frames come from a real session running the packaged extension, captured from the running TUI and re-rendered as a static frame for legibility.

Command: /peek [path[:line[:column]]]

• Without arguments, the overlay lists the file paths found in the current session transcript (user messages, assistant text, tool-call arguments and tool results) and previews the focused one. Only paths that resolve to an existing file or directory are listed. Directories are included on purpose — a folder previews its first entries — but they are listed after the files and marked with a trailing /, so a reply that names a folder and its files does not make the folder look like one more file.
• With an argument, that path is previewed directly. :line and :line:column suffixes are honoured: the requested line is marked and the window is centered around it.

Shortcut: alt+o — same as /peek with no argument. (alt+p was avoided deliberately: it is a default keybinding for "cycle to previous model" on Windows and WSL.)

Keyboard (primary path)

Mouse (additive, fullscreen only)

In fullscreen mode, hovering a path row moves the preview focus to it and a left click reveals the file. Mouse events are ignored outside fullscreen (Pi routes normalized mouse input to extensions only there) — the keyboard always works.

Per-platform reveal behaviour

Enter (or a click) never throws; failures surface as notifications.

The WSL path conversion runs wslpath -w (3 s timeout) when WSL_DISTRO_NAME or WSL_INTEROP is set; if it fails, the reveal is reported as a notification instead of guessing.

Documented Linux fallback: xdg-open cannot select a file, so on plain Linux the containing directory is opened instead. (The original plugin used the org.freedesktop.FileManager1 D-Bus interface; that protocol hop is not implemented here.)

Spawns are bounded (5 s timeout, then killed) and happen only from an explicit user action — never when the extension loads.

Previews

• Code / text — first 20 lines (14 in the overlay window, scrollable with PgUp/PgDn), line numbers, total line count, guessed language, and a small dependency-free regex highlighter (keywords, strings, comments, numbers) themed with Pi's syntax tokens.
• Image — mime type plus pixel dimensions parsed cheaply from the file header (PNG, GIF, WebP VP8/VP8L/VP8X, JPEG). When the terminal supports inline images (Kitty / iTerm2 protocols), the image renders inline; the terminal-capability fallback shows a plain-text summary instead.
• Directory — the first entries and the total count.
• Binary / other — metadata only, with a note.

Documented limits

• Text is never read for files larger than 1 MB or containing a NUL byte; those fall back to a metadata-only preview.
• The highlighter is line-local: a block comment opened on one line is styled only to the end of that line.
• Path extraction is heuristic. Absolute paths, ~/..., ./..., ../..., relative paths with separators, bare filenames with an extension, and backticked paths containing spaces are recognised; URLs are ignored. Relative paths resolve against the session working directory first and the project root second; anything that does not exist is kept unresolved and skipped by the caller.
• The peek cannot be triggered by hovering a path inside built-in chat messages: Pi exposes no render hook for built-in messages (E3 in the project ODD doc). The overlay opened by /peek / alt+o is the extension's own surface, so that is where keyboard and mouse work.
• Thumbnail rendering depends on the terminal's image protocol support and is not verified without real terminal emulation (see the project ODD doc, S8).