The interface

What the portal does in the browser, apart from the chat itself. Everything on this page is kept in this browser — the theme, the animations, the language, the confirmations, the shortcuts — so a phone and a laptop can differ without one changing the other. The exception is the tools switched off by default, which the server keeps.

Install it as an app

The portal is a progressive web app. Chrome, Edge and Safari offer Install (or Add to Home Screen) in the address bar or share menu, and it then opens in its own window with no browser chrome. The app's title bar follows the portal's theme, and its icon offers Sessions and Projects as shortcuts.

Browsers install an app only over HTTPS or on localhost. Behind Tailscale, tailscale serve gives the portal a certificate; over plain http:// on a LAN address the browser will not offer it.

When the server is out of reach — restarting, or the phone is off the VPN — the installed app still opens, from the last page the server gave, and says the server cannot be reached, as a tab does. Nothing the agent does is cached: the API and the agent's browser view always go to the server. A deploy shows up on the next load rather than the one after.

When the portal does not answer as the page loads — it is restarting during an upgrade, say — the page says Cannot reach the portal and asks again by itself, with a Try again button for impatience. It does not fall back to the password form: your login is still good, and only a portal that says you are not signed in shows that.

The sidebar and extensions' pages

The pages that installed extensions bring are not among the portal's own in the sidebar: they are together under Extensions, above Audit, which stays the last destination. The group folds like a folder and is remembered in this browser. It is open until you fold it, and stays open while one of its pages is showing. Folded to the rail of icons, the sidebar has one puzzle button instead, before the one for Audit, which opens a menu of those pages: the arrow keys move, Enter picks one, Esc closes the menu. With no extension page there is no group and no button. Media is one of them, listed while an image or a video endpoint is set up.

A chat that an extension gave sub-chats has them under its row, behind a line that opens and shuts them, rather than among the chats (Sub-chats).

Theme

Settings → This browser → Theme is light, dark or System, the default, which follows the machine and changes with it — at sunset, on a desktop that flips.

An installed extension can bring a theme: other colours in place of the portal's own, for light, for dark or for both. Where one is installed, Colours under the three appears, with the portal's own and each theme to choose from. See Themes.

In both themes even the quietest text — hints, timestamps, placeholders — keeps a contrast of at least 4.5:1 against what it is drawn on, and the keyboard focus is a 2px outline in the full accent colour, round fields, checkboxes, dropdowns and buttons alike.

Animations

The portal has always moved a little: panels slide in, menus unroll, a working chat's mark breathes. On top of that sits a layer of larger flourishes, on by default:

• Opening the portal. Its mark lights up and two doors part on it. About a second, and only when you open the portal — not when you reload the page.
• Chats. Opening or switching to one lets the conversation you leave drift away and the last messages of the next swing in one after another, with its name sliding in. A chat that was deleted dissolves.
• Messages. What you send rises from the send button's corner as the arrow on it flies off; what the agent answers and runs rises in; something that went wrong shakes once.
• Deleting. A chat's row, in the sidebar and on Sessions, flashes red and breaks apart while the rows below close the gap; a deleted message and the reply to it do the same in the conversation. A new chat's row slides in, and a chat that moves up the list, or is pinned, slides to its new place.
• Panels. They come in from the side they are docked at with a bounce, drop away when closed, and a panel carried to another place flies there from where you let go of it.
• Dialogs, menus and lists. A dialog swings up out of the page and sinks when it closes, and so does the picture viewer; a menu unrolls from its button, its lines one after another; a drop-down list does the same.
• Settings. The side navigation comes in line by line, the page you pick slides in, and a switch's knob bounces.
• The browser. Its screen switches on like an old tube, on the Browser page, beside a chat and in voice mode. See The agent's browser.
• Voice mode. The orb comes up out of a swell of light, and the windows that open on its stage overshoot into place.
• Pictures being made. While the agent has a picture made or changed, a soft light drifts over the frame that holds its place and a sheen passes; the picture then fades in over it. See Sessions.

None of it waits for you or takes a click away: what is leaving is a picture of what was there, laid over the page, while the page itself is already as it will be. Nothing moves on a keystroke or as the agent's words stream in.

Settings → This browser → Animations switches all of this off. It is kept in this browser, like the theme, so a phone and a laptop can differ. Off, the portal is as it was before the flourishes were added.

If your system asks for reduced motion (the prefers-reduced-motion setting), the flourishes do not play, whatever the switch says, and the portal's own quieter motion steps aside as well. The switch says so while that is the case.

Language

English and German. See Settings → Language.

Phone and narrow windows

On a phone the sidebar's rail gives way to a compact layout with larger touch targets. The same pages and settings are there; nothing is left out. The navigation opens as a drawer over the page; Esc closes it, and a window widened past the phone layout closes it too.

On a wide screen the chat's panels — the browser, the terminal, Files, Git, canvases — dock beside the conversation, each on its own side. See Files and Session canvases.

Confirmations

Deleting a session, a project, a routine and the like asks first, and so does removing an MCP server or an extension. Settings → This browser → Confirmations → Ask before deleting turns the question off. It is kept per browser deliberately: a phone that trips over a delete button is not made safer by the laptop having turned the question off.

Closing a dialog with something typed in that is not saved yet — a skill you rewrote, a provider (its key, its models and their windows), project, MCP server or channel you are setting up, a person's notes, a project's instructions, a pasted config, pi's settings.json under Advanced, an extension's setting (the voice service's voice settings, a voice you are adding there, image generation, memory), the avatar — asks Discard your changes? first, whether you press Esc, click beside the dialog or use its close button. That question is always asked: nothing else holds a copy of a draft. A field that says it is saved when you leave it, such as the default context window, is saved by every one of those ways out, Esc included. A dialog's own Cancel button is an answer already, and closes it without asking.

Notifications

See Settings. They need HTTPS or localhost.

Tools

Every tool an extension, an MCP server or pi itself offers can be switched off, in two places:

• Settings → Tools sets what every conversation starts with. A tool switched off there is not offered to the model at all; the extension stays installed and its slash commands keep working. Tools are listed once a conversation has run, because that is when pi builds the list of what its extensions registered. The tools an extension's server half offers are the exception: Media's generate_image and edit_image are listed as soon as image generation or editing is switched on, and its video tools as soon as video generation is. A group can be switched off as a whole, and each package can be given a name of your own — Rename — for the list. Media's picture and video tools (show_image, generate_image, edit_image, generate_video and show_video) are one group in every tool list, its package's, pithagoras-media, as any extension's tools are in the group of its package.
• Projects → Tools on a project's row sets what every chat in that project starts with, against the portal-wide default; see Projects.
• Tools on an agent's page sets what every chat in its home and every run it does on its own starts with (Agents), and Tools on a routine's page what every run of it starts with (Routines).
• The tools control of a chat switches them for that chat only, from its next message. It is there before the first message too, so a tool can be kept away from a chat from the start.

A deployment that cannot switch tools (EXECUTOR=container) says so in place of the list. A portal that did not answer is not taken for that: the list says it could not be read and offers Try again, and a switch the portal did not save snaps back with the reason beside it.

Both are safety tools as much as convenience: a browser or shell tool that a chat has no business with is simply not there to be talked into. An MCP server is a group like any other, switched whole or tool by tool; a tool switched off is not reachable through the adapter's mcp tool either, and one the MCP configuration leaves out is not listed at all; see MCP servers.

One server per data directory

Two portals on the same data would each mark the other's running chats as interrupted. The server therefore holds a socket inside its data directory (portal.sock), and a second one started on the same data exits with a message instead of failing on the port. A socket left behind by a server that ended is replaced. This includes a server the agent starts from a chat with another PORT.

Keyboard shortcuts

Settings → Shortcuts lists them, and the voice-mode ones can be changed — see Settings.

Dialogs, an extension's question and the phone's navigation drawer take the keyboard when they open: focus moves into them, Tab goes round them instead of into the page behind, and Esc (or closing them) puts focus back where it was.

With a screen reader

Every button, field and slider has a name that is spoken: the icon-only ones carry their action ("Pin First chat", "Rename First chat"), and the name stays when a hover tip would have blanked the title. A button that opens a list says so and whether it is open (the context pill, the model and effort buttons), and a field that a tab or a list belongs to points at it.

• A run that ends is announced once, with the start of its last reply, or "The run has finished." where it said nothing. The reply is not read out word by word while it is written.
• The command list (type the command character in the message box) is the box's own: the arrow keys move through it and the command they are on is what is read out.
• What went wrong is announced when it appears: a refused pin, rename or delete (in the sidebar and on Sessions), a wrong password, a failed load, a message under a field. An error that is a banner has a Dismiss button, and goes away by itself once the next try works.
• Where you are: the sidebar's navigation is named and marks the page that is open; the Memory graph is a group of notes, each one a button.
• A diff is a table with named columns, and a line that was added or removed says so in words as well as with its sign.
• The terminal is readable: its screen is also drawn as text for a screen reader, and its input has a name in the language of the page.