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Sep 18, 2026community

pi formats long shell durations in minutes and seconds, with hours when needed, and aligns the ctrl+x copy description with what the shortcut actually does

Two more pull requests went into pi on September 18, 2026, one feature and one fix, each answering a filed issue. rwachtler’s #9742 makes long-running shell commands report their duration in human units, and christianklotz’s #9745 stops /hotkeys from underselling what the ctrl+x copy shortcut can do.

The Bash and PowerShell tools used to render every duration the same way: one decimal number of seconds. A command that ran 1,592 seconds — the exact example issue #9628 opens with — displayed as Elapsed 1592.2s and left the reader doing arithmetic. Durations of a minute or more now format as minutes and seconds, 26m 32s in that case, and past an hour a third segment appears, as in 1h 0m 0s. Anything under sixty seconds keeps the decimal form, so a 4.2-second command still reads 4.2s. The change landed with regression tests pinning the boundaries between the three shapes, covering readings taken while the command is still running as well as after it completes.

#9745 fixes #9660, where the ctrl+x shortcut — the app.message.copy action — had one behavior and three descriptions: /hotkeys called it “Copy last assistant message”, the keybinding registry said “Copy message to clipboard”, and docs/keybindings.md described the real chain. That chain, as the issue lays it out: inside /tree it copies the selected message; in the fullscreen TUI with fullscreenCopyOnSelect set to false and an active selection it copies that selection; otherwise it copies the last assistant message. The fix changes no behavior — the keybinding description and the /hotkeys row now both read “Copy selection or last assistant message”, in step with what the shortcut already did.

Both changes are on main for now; the most recent tag remains v0.85.1 from September 5, so neither reaches an npm install until the next release cut. Each traces back to its issue: #9628 wanted elapsed minutes instead of mental math, and #9660 wanted a help table that describes the whole shortcut.

source: https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/pulls?q=is%3Apr+merged%3A2026-09-18+is%3Aclosed