What Orbit is
Orbit is a native desktop workbench for the pi coding agent. It is a Rust app rendered with GPUI, the GPU-accelerated UI framework behind Zed — no browser, no web view, no Node UI layer.
Orbit is not a chat wrapper around a model API. It spawns the pi CLI as a child process and speaks pi's own RPC protocol over stdio. The model catalog, tools, thinking levels, and sessions stay pi's; Orbit is the window onto them. A session you create in Orbit and one you create in the terminal are the same file.
How it works
Orbit (Rust · GPUI) │ newline-delimited JSON RPC over stdio ▼ pi CLI (one child process per open session) │ ▼ ~/.pi/agent/ sessions · config · usage
Requests go to pi as JSON on stdin; pi streams events back as JSON lines on stdout — text and thinking deltas, tool calls, question dialogs, and settle signals. Because the runtime is pi itself, anything the CLI can do, Orbit can drive, and nothing is reimplemented twice.
What you need
- pi — the coding agent CLI that does the work. Install it from the pi repository.
- Node.js — needed by many MCP servers (run through
npx) and by pi packages. - Git — powers the Review pane, the Git page, and worktrees.
On first launch Orbit checks for all three and reports anything missing along with the command to install it. You can revisit this any time from Settings.
Where your data lives
| Path | What is there |
|---|---|
~/.pi/agent/sessions/ | Your sessions — the same files the pi CLI reads and writes. |
~/.pi/agent/ | pi configuration, including its MCP config and credentials. |
~/.orbit-pi/ | Orbit preferences: layout, access mode, workflow mode, notifications, the worktree root, and the MCP secret store. |
<project>/.pi/ | Project-scoped pi configuration, including a project mcp.json. |
Guides
Workbench
Missing something? Open an issue on GitHub.