Slash commands

Type / in the composer and the palette lists everything available in that session. Commands are matched against the real list, so a message that merely begins with a path — /etc/hosts is wrong — is still sent as a message.

The / is only how you type a command, and it can be another character: see The command character. This page writes / throughout.

The list is all of them — a lone / scrolls rather than stopping at the first few — narrowing as you type, by prefix, and it is driven from the keyboard:

Key	Does
↑ ↓	Move the highlight; it wraps
Tab	Complete the highlighted command, leaving the cursor after it for arguments
Enter	Run the highlighted command. /cl and Enter is /clear, not the message "/cl"
Esc	Put the list away until something else is typed

A command typed out in full is the one highlighted, so /skill:a never runs /skill:ab because that was listed first. A command that does nothing without an argument — /name — is completed by Enter instead of run, so there is somewhere to type the name.

A command that opens a dialog does not appear in the transcript. Its menu is the feedback; a chat bubble saying /models would be noise.

The command character

Settings → This browser → Command character sets what a command starts with in the message box. It is / until you change it, and it can be any one punctuation mark or symbol — !, ., ;, #, § — but not a letter or a digit, which would open the list for every message you write, nor -, _ or :, which are part of a command's own name.

With ! chosen, typing ! opens the same list, Tab completes !skill:review, Enter runs the highlighted one, and the key that jumps to the message box from anywhere on the page is ! as well. That jump does not work for a dead key — ^ on a German keyboard, for one — which the browser does not report as the character it will type; such a character still starts a command typed in the message box. A message that starts with ! and is not one of the chat's commands — !important: the build is red — is sent as it was written, as /etc/hosts is wrong is under the slash.

pi is always sent the slash form. Whichever character you typed, !skill:review the diff reaches the agent as /skill:review the diff, so skills, prompt templates and every extension command keep working, and so do channels and routines, which know nothing of this setting. That is also why the chat's own line for a command, and the commands the agent suggests in a status line, still show a /. A command typed out in full with the slash — /compact — still runs as one after the character has been changed.

The choice is kept in this browser, like the theme and the keyboard shortcuts: what is convenient to type depends on the keyboard (a German one reaches / with Shift), and a phone may want another character than the laptop.

Where they come from

Source	Provided by
builtin	The portal
extension	An installed pi package
prompt	A prompt template
skill	A skill

Builtins

pi's builtin commands are implemented by whichever mode is running — the TUI draws its own — so the portal supplies them. The names and descriptions are read from the SDK's own BUILTIN_SLASH_COMMANDS, so they track pi's releases rather than drifting from a copy.

Only the ones the portal can actually service are offered. /quit, /hotkeys, /trust and the auth commands are terminal concerns; listing them would be a menu of things that quietly do nothing.

Command	Does
/compact	Summarise the conversation to free context
/session	Model, effort, context, tokens, cost, tool calls
/export	Write the session out — HTML, or .jsonl if you name one
/reload	Reload extensions, skills, prompts and settings
/model	Open the model picker
/settings	Open settings
/new	Start a new chat in this project (Home, if that is where you are)
/clear	The same as /new
/name	Rename the session

The first four act on the session server-side and report through the event stream. The rest open portal UI and never reach pi.

/compact is not awaited — it is a model call, and holding the HTTP request open for it would time out. It reports when it finishes.

Extension commands

Anything an installed package registers appears automatically. Install pi-llama-cpp and /models shows up, opening the same menu the TUI draws:

/models  [extension]  Browse Llama.cpp models

Interactive commands work because the portal binds a UI context when it creates the session. Without one, pi hands the extension a default immediately and a command that asks a question appears to do nothing. Dialogs are rendered as a modal — select, confirm, input and editor are all supported.

Dialog events are deliberately never persisted. A stored one would be replayed to every future reader, so reloading the page reopened a menu whose extension had long since stopped waiting.

Adding more

Install a pi package from Settings → Extensions. Its commands appear the next time the palette refreshes, which happens when a run ends — no reload needed.