Felipe Coury
0bdeab330b
# TL;DR - Adds recognized slash commands to the TUI's local in-session recall history. - This is the MVP of the whole feature: it keeps slash-command recall local only: nothing is written to persistent history, app-server history, or core history storage. - Treats slash commands like submitted text once they parse as a known built-in command, regardless of whether command dispatch later succeeds. # Problem Slash commands are handled outside the normal message submission path, so they could clear the composer without becoming part of the local Up-arrow recall list. That made command-heavy workflows awkward: after running `/diff`, `/rename Better title`, `/plan investigate this`, or even a valid command that reports a usage error, users had to retype the command instead of recalling and editing it like a normal prompt. The goal of this PR is to make slash commands feel like submitted input inside the current TUI session while keeping the change deliberately local. This is not persistent history yet; it only affects the composer's in-memory recall behavior. # Mental model The composer owns draft state and local recall. When slash input parses as a recognized built-in command, the composer stages the submitted command text before returning `InputResult::Command` or `InputResult::CommandWithArgs`. `ChatWidget` then dispatches the command and records the staged entry once dispatch returns to the input-result path. Command-name recognition is the only validation before local recall. A valid slash command is recallable whether it succeeds, fails with a usage error, no-ops, is unavailable while a task is running, or is skipped by command-specific logic. An unrecognized slash command is different: it is restored as a draft, surfaces the existing unrecognized-command message, and is not added to recall. Bare commands recalled from typed text use the trimmed submitted draft. Commands selected from the popup record the canonical command text, such as `/diff`, rather than the partial filter text the user typed. Inline commands with arguments keep the original command invocation available locally even when their arguments are later prepared through the normal submission pipeline. # Non-goals Persisting slash commands across sessions is intentionally out of scope. This change does not modify app-server history, core history storage, protocol events, or message submission semantics. This does not change command availability, command side effects, popup filtering, command parsing, or the semantics of unsupported commands. It only changes whether recognized slash-command invocations are available through local Up-arrow recall after the user submits them. # Tradeoffs The main tradeoff is that recall is based on command recognition, not command outcome. This intentionally favors a simpler user model: if the TUI accepted the input as a slash command, the user can recall and edit that input just like plain text. That means valid-but-unsuccessful invocations such as usage errors are recallable, which is useful when the next action is usually to edit and retry. The previous accept/reject design required command dispatch to report a boolean outcome, which made the dispatcher API noisier and forced every branch to decide history behavior. This version keeps the dispatch APIs as side-effect-only methods and localizes history recording to the slash-command input path. Inline command handling still avoids double-recording by preparing inline arguments without using the normal message-submission history path. The staged slash-command entry remains the single local recall record for the command invocation. # Architecture `ChatComposer` stages a pending `HistoryEntry` when recognized slash-command input is promoted into an input result. The pending entry mirrors the existing local history payload shape so recall can restore text elements, local images, remote images, mention bindings, and pending paste state when those are present. `BottomPane` exposes a narrow method for recording that staged command entry because it owns the composer. `ChatWidget` records the staged entry after dispatching a recognized command from the input-result match. Valid commands rejected before they reach `ChatWidget`, such as commands unavailable while a task is running, are staged and recorded in the composer path that detects the rejection. Slash-command dispatch itself now lives in `chatwidget/slash_dispatch.rs` so the behavior is reviewable without adding more weight to `chatwidget.rs`. The extraction is behavior-preserving: the dispatch match arms stay intact, while the input flow in `chatwidget.rs` remains the single place that connects submitted slash-command input to dispatch. # Observability There is no new logging because this is a local UI recall behavior and the result is directly visible through Up-arrow recall. The practical debug path is to trace Enter through `ChatComposer::try_dispatch_bare_slash_command`, `ChatComposer::try_dispatch_slash_command_with_args`, or popup Enter/Tab handling, then confirm the recognized command is staged before dispatch and recorded exactly once afterward. If a valid command unexpectedly does not appear in recall, check whether the input path staged slash history before clearing the composer and whether it used the `ChatWidget` slash-dispatch wrapper. If an unrecognized command unexpectedly appears in recall, check the parser branch that should restore the draft instead of staging history. # Tests Composer-level tests cover staging and recording for a bare typed slash command, a popup-selected command, and an inline command with arguments. Chat-widget tests cover valid commands being recallable after normal dispatch, inline dispatch, usage errors, task-running unavailability, no-op stub dispatch, and command-specific skip behavior such as `/init` when an instructions file already exists. They also cover the negative case: unrecognized slash commands are not added to local recall.
Codex CLI (Rust Implementation)
We provide Codex CLI as a standalone, native executable to ensure a zero-dependency install.
Installing Codex
Today, the easiest way to install Codex is via npm:
npm i -g @openai/codex
codex
You can also install via Homebrew (brew install --cask codex) or download a platform-specific release directly from our GitHub Releases.
Documentation quickstart
- First run with Codex? Start with
docs/getting-started.md(links to the walkthrough for prompts, keyboard shortcuts, and session management). - Want deeper control? See
docs/config.mdanddocs/install.md.
What's new in the Rust CLI
The Rust implementation is now the maintained Codex CLI and serves as the default experience. It includes a number of features that the legacy TypeScript CLI never supported.
Config
Codex supports a rich set of configuration options. Note that the Rust CLI uses config.toml instead of config.json. See docs/config.md for details.
Model Context Protocol Support
MCP client
Codex CLI functions as an MCP client that allows the Codex CLI and IDE extension to connect to MCP servers on startup. See the configuration documentation for details.
MCP server (experimental)
Codex can be launched as an MCP server by running codex mcp-server. This allows other MCP clients to use Codex as a tool for another agent.
Use the @modelcontextprotocol/inspector to try it out:
npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector codex mcp-server
Use codex mcp to add/list/get/remove MCP server launchers defined in config.toml, and codex mcp-server to run the MCP server directly.
Notifications
You can enable notifications by configuring a script that is run whenever the agent finishes a turn. The notify documentation includes a detailed example that explains how to get desktop notifications via terminal-notifier on macOS. When Codex detects that it is running under WSL 2 inside Windows Terminal (WT_SESSION is set), the TUI automatically falls back to native Windows toast notifications so approval prompts and completed turns surface even though Windows Terminal does not implement OSC 9.
codex exec to run Codex programmatically/non-interactively
To run Codex non-interactively, run codex exec PROMPT (you can also pass the prompt via stdin) and Codex will work on your task until it decides that it is done and exits. If you provide both a prompt argument and piped stdin, Codex appends stdin as a <stdin> block after the prompt so patterns like echo "my output" | codex exec "Summarize this concisely" work naturally. Output is printed to the terminal directly. You can set the RUST_LOG environment variable to see more about what's going on.
Use codex exec --ephemeral ... to run without persisting session rollout files to disk.
Experimenting with the Codex Sandbox
To test to see what happens when a command is run under the sandbox provided by Codex, we provide the following subcommands in Codex CLI:
# macOS
codex sandbox macos [--full-auto] [--log-denials] [COMMAND]...
# Linux
codex sandbox linux [--full-auto] [COMMAND]...
# Windows
codex sandbox windows [--full-auto] [COMMAND]...
# Legacy aliases
codex debug seatbelt [--full-auto] [--log-denials] [COMMAND]...
codex debug landlock [--full-auto] [COMMAND]...
Selecting a sandbox policy via --sandbox
The Rust CLI exposes a dedicated --sandbox (-s) flag that lets you pick the sandbox policy without having to reach for the generic -c/--config option:
# Run Codex with the default, read-only sandbox
codex --sandbox read-only
# Allow the agent to write within the current workspace while still blocking network access
codex --sandbox workspace-write
# Danger! Disable sandboxing entirely (only do this if you are already running in a container or other isolated env)
codex --sandbox danger-full-access
The same setting can be persisted in ~/.codex/config.toml via the top-level sandbox_mode = "MODE" key, e.g. sandbox_mode = "workspace-write".
In workspace-write, Codex also includes ~/.codex/memories in its writable roots so memory maintenance does not require an extra approval.
Code Organization
This folder is the root of a Cargo workspace. It contains quite a bit of experimental code, but here are the key crates:
core/contains the business logic for Codex. Ultimately, we hope this to be a library crate that is generally useful for building other Rust/native applications that use Codex.exec/"headless" CLI for use in automation.tui/CLI that launches a fullscreen TUI built with Ratatui.cli/CLI multitool that provides the aforementioned CLIs via subcommands.
If you want to contribute or inspect behavior in detail, start by reading the module-level README.md files under each crate and run the project workspace from the top-level codex-rs directory so shared config, features, and build scripts stay aligned.