Any way for an extension to render a live panel in the terminal?
- Dominant language
- Shell
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Description
### Describe the feature or problem you'd like to solve
An extension has no way to render a live, refreshing panel in the terminal (e.g. a sub-agent progress dashboard) — `session.log` only appends scrolling text.
### Proposed solution
I'm building a CLI extension that runs a bunch of sub-agents in parallel and I want to show progress while they run. Something like:
```
my-run · explore · 3/5 done · 02:14
✓ auth-coverage done 45s 12.3K tok
✓ input-validation done 38s 10.1K tok
⠿ rate-limiting streaming 41s 3.2KB 8.7K tok
⠿ error-handling tool 41s (web_fetch)
· cors-policy pending 0s
```
ideally refreshing in place.
As far as I can tell there's no way to do this from an extension right now. The only output options are `session.log(..., { ephemeral: true })`, which is just scrolling text with no fixed region, and the modal `session.ui.*` dialogs. Since stdout is the JSON-RPC channel I can't draw to the terminal myself either.
I have all the data on the extension side (state, elapsed, tokens, current tool per agent) — I just have no surface to render it on.
Would you consider an API for extensions to render a panel like this in the TUI?
Even a read-only snapshot (no keyboard, no live push) would be enough to start — the extension hands the host some structured rows and the host draws them. Live updates could come later.
`@github/copilot` ~1.0.65, extension via `@github/copilot-sdk/extension`.
### Example prompts or workflows
_No response_
### Additional context
_No response_
Contributor guide
Research direction
Start by reviewing the extension API exposed through @github/copilot-sdk/extension and how session.log and session.ui.* are surfaced in the TUI. Define the smallest structured-row snapshot API first, then verify that an extension can provide the requested data and that the host renders it as a fixed terminal panel; live refresh and interaction are explicitly later considerations.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- github
- Domain
- cli, developer-experience
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Quiet
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 35/100