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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

"Been running it almost barebones vanilla for a couple of months. Just a bunch of basic extensions and some skills."

I am also using pi exclusively after having had decent success with openhands but begrudging all of the docker infrastructure ... and all of the emojis.

My only pain point is that in my extremely common and boring workflow, which is pi inside of gnu screen inside of OSX terminal.app ... all reasoning/thinking text is blinking ... like old fashioned ANSI blink on a BBS.

I cannot figure out how to disable the blinking thought/reasoning text ...

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I just fixed something very similar in my setup. Except in my case the reasoning text was shown in dark grey on a light gray background. Very ugly and hard to read.

If I remember correctly, the reasoning text was being output using the italic ANSI code, which was being formatted funny on my terminal. I fixed it by adding a font that supports italics. I recommend taking a look at the ansi codes.

Thanks.

This seems like an obvious configuration option - I can imagine someone disliking the italics as well…

If only we had a way to tell the machine to locate and fix this problem to our liking...

Good joke, but I wonder how many people get it based on the reactions below.

Perhaps Pi should ask after x days of installation; is there anything I can do to make the interaction better?

For a second I was hoping that Pi users would be the kind of people to not enjoy nags about improvements.

> Pi can explain its own features and look up its docs. Ask it how to use or extend Pi.

That line is in the startup message everytime...

Have you tried a different terminal app, such as Ghostty? https://ghostty.org/ has a Mac build, and handles italics properly. That might solve your issue without having to edit any configuration files. Plus, as a side benefit, Ghostty ignores the ANSI color codes for blinking text, so you won't ever see blinking text again.

I am wondering why people are so hyped about Ghostty? I gave it recently a try coming from kitty. And I had to configure stuff that worked out of the box with kitty, like Ctrl-Enter support and other key combos for agent harnesses. I like the development model of ghostt. And the developer really cares about creating great building blocks, e.g libghostty. But I am a bit underwhelmed.

Might depend on what you're comparing to.

Came from iTerm2, and Ghostty is much faster and minimal.

I feel like the ghostty hype make more sense as excitement around the direction of terminal infra than a claim it is the one true terminal. Kitty's fine and if you are happy with it there's probably no good reason to switch.

Tangentially I also kind of feel like there is some level of deification of Mitchell's products but that's a diff topic.

I was running into similar issues where italics text was blinking. I traced it back to a bug in screen, which I patched in my own screen fork. Not sure if exactly the same bug but could be? https://github.com/Sothatsit/screen

If you love your terminal app and won't switch to Ghostty or WezTerm, at least try tmux instead of the venerable but ancient GNU screen.

Alacritty plus Zellij works great for me. Much easier to use than tmux

Didn't know about Zellij, seems very good, thank you!

Terminal.app Settings/Profiles has a checkbox "Allow blinking text" you can uncheck

Apart from a different terminal app, try `/settings`, find the "TUI mode" or whatever, and set it to fullscreen. It fixed all my flickering and other issues.

See if you can replicate this inside of tmux. It might be screen's escape code handling.

Afaik iTerm2 is the usual upgrade for the macOS terminal isn’t it?

It's the goto, but there are better options IMO.

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