pi-fff: support explicit index roots when Pi starts in $HOME #868

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1. gustav-fff commented on Sep 10, 2026

   

   gustav-fff

   on Sep 10, 2026

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   [triage-bot] DESIGN NEEDED: indexRoots cannot be a config-only change — no PR opened.

   Classified feature-request. Not a duplicate of #743/#749/#588 — those are the all-home opt-out, this is scoped multi-root. Confirmed no multi-root concept exists anywhere in the tree (grep -rn 'indexRoots|index_roots|multiRoot' → 0 hits outside this issue).

   Blocker: one picker == one root

   FilePicker holds a single base_path, set once at construction:

   • crates/fff-core/src/file_picker.rs:903 — base_path: path (scalar, no collection)
   • packages/shared/fff-api.ts — InitOptions.basePath is a single string

   So indexRoots: ["/root/Projects", "/root/.pi"] cannot become one index. It has to become N pickers plus a fan-out/merge layer in pi-fff. That layer does not exist.

   Why it is not small

   Every search path in pi-fff assumes exactly one main index:

   • packages/pi-fff/src/index.ts:872 and :1074 — find_files / grep pick one picker
   • packages/pi-fff/src/index.ts:565 — @-mention autocomplete calls mixedSearch on one finder
   • packages/pi-fff/src/index.ts:1317, :1332, :1351 — health / scan-progress / rescan tools read mainFinder directly

   Fan-out forces four decisions that are yours, not mine:

   1. Score comparability. Fuzzy scores in score.rs are relative to the corpus of one index. Concatenating results from N independent indexes and sorting by score is not obviously correct — a match in a 200-file root will not rank fairly against one in a 200k-file root.
   2. Pagination. pageIndex/pageSize are per-picker. A stable merged cursor across N indexes needs a new cursor encoding; grep already has its own cursor at index.ts:928.
   3. Grep time budget. index.ts:932 passes a single timeBudgetMs: GREP_TIME_BUDGET_MS to one picker. Across N pickers this is either N× the wall clock or a divided budget that regresses per-root recall. Directly touches [Bug]: grep timeBudgetMs is ignored for zero-match searches #826/fix(grep): enforce_time_budget option for zero-match searches (#826) #827.
   4. Memory / retention. The reporter asks to retain the indexes. AuxFinderPool deliberately does the opposite: MAX_AUX = 3 with LRU eviction (aux-finders.ts:7, :90-95) and a 5-minute idle TTL (aux-finders.ts:8, :42-52). Pinning configured roots means N resident indexes plus N file watchers for the whole session. For this repo that is a perf decision, not an implementation detail.

   Rough size if done faithfully: 500-700 LOC across config.ts, pi-fff.schema.json, aux-finders.ts, index.ts, tests, README.md. Under the hard limit, but it changes the single-index invariant of the extension, so I am not landing it speculatively.

   Already works today (workaround for @Abdk4Moura)

   Per-query scoped search outside cwd is implemented. An explicit path argument routes to a lazily-created aux picker (aux-finders.ts:167-184 → :126-153), so the agent can already search ~/Projects without indexing all of $HOME. What is missing is only the pre-warm and pin half — the index is built on first use and evicted after 5 min idle.

   Note that with enableHomeDirScanning: false and cwd == $HOME the main picker fails outright at file_picker.rs:881-886 (surfaces via file-picker.ts:39-43 → index.ts:708), which is open issue #857. Any indexRoots work has to settle #857 first, since that is the exact configuration this request targets.

   @dmtrKovalenko — needs your call

   • Fan-out-and-merge across N pickers, or keep it lazy and only add pre-warm + pin (much smaller, no merge semantics, no scoring risk)?
   • If merge: what is the cross-index ranking rule, and does grep get N× budget or a divided one?
   • Are N resident indexes + N watchers acceptable for a whole session?

   Not proceeding without an answer — the merge semantics are a design choice I should not guess at.

   Honk-Honk 🪿
2. gustav-fff

   added

   triaged

   feature-requestFeature requestFeature request

   on Sep 10, 2026
3. dmtrKovalenko commented on Sep 11, 2026

   

   dmtrKovalenko

   on Sep 11, 2026

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   The easiest way to achieve this is to have a .ignore file where you ignore everything in your $HOME and unignore specifid directories .ignore works liike .gitignore but doesn't need git
4. Abdk4Moura commented on Sep 13, 2026

   

   Abdk4Moura

   on Sep 13, 2026

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   Thanks, this works for my use case. I appreciate the clarification.

   👍React with 👍1Reacted by Dmitriy Kovalenko
5. dmtrKovalenko

   closed this as not plannedon Sep 13, 2026