🎉 New Extension: Chat Edit Live - Clean Up Your Chat Buffer Messages

[arnm]

I've built a small extension for CodeCompanion that lets you remove messages from your chat history while preserving conversation flow. Perfect for cleaning up messy conversations or removing outdated context.

chat-edit-live.mp4

What it does

• Picker mode: Select specific user messages to remove (everything after gets deleted)
• Quick mode: Remove the last non-empty user message
• Maintains proper chat structure and adds empty user prompt for continuation

Why it's useful

• Clean up experimental prompts or failed attempts
• Remove outdated context that's confusing the LLM
• Keep conversations focused and relevant
• Perfect for iterative prompt development

Setup

Get the extension: https://gist.github.com/arnm/27f732be70a337c491688ebae22b6de4

-- In your CodeCompanion config
["chat-edit-live"] = {
  keymap_picker = "gE", -- Default: picker mode
  keymap_quick = "gO",   -- Default: quick removal
}

Usage

• Press gE in a chat buffer to pick messages to remove
• Press gO to quickly remove the last user message
• Continue typing in the empty prompt area

The extension handles all the complexity of maintaining proper chat state, message cycles, and UI rendering. Works great for keeping your conversations clean and focused!

Anyone else finding chat history management useful? I honestly think it should be builtin :)

[nickgnd]

Interesting, thanks for sharing! I was indeed looking for something similar.

My initial naive idea was that the chat was a normal buffer and therefore I could edit the conversation (mainly delete messages) as you would do normally in VIM, but I quickly found out that it's not like that.

[pratyushmittal]

Yeah, I too used to think that initially. I wish if this can be made possible.

[jinzhongjia]

I think this is necessary if it can be built in

[olimorris]

This is originally how CodeCompanion worked but if you press gd you'll see there's a huge amount of information we require other than role and content. It's non-trivial to be able to re-parse a whole buffer and map it to the messages table, although I left that door open with the id field on each message...

[olimorris]

This looks awesome. Great job @arnm

[arnm]

Thank you!

I do want to mention that there were many quirks to trying to do this and it be worth while to understand exactly what is going on (not going to pretend I didnt just hack this together until it worked 😅).

Specifically, in the apply function. It should be much simpler that it currently is but there were two main inconstancies in which the subsequent user submission after a removal would either send a concatenated string of (previous user prompts + their new prompt) or an empty submission altogether.

The current apply is a bunch of hacks to get it working properly and tbh, not really sure exactly what was the thing that got it working. The main issue is related to the re-render of the buffer. If i didn't have to re-render the buffer, simply setting the messages was sufficient.