It occurred to me today that I now spend more time in the Codex TUI than I do in Vim. Unbelievable.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the last couple days prompting Codex TUI to help me resolve little quality-of-life problems that I have with Codex TUI. This type of Codex inception works wonderfully.
Nearly every time I do it, there’s a headslap moment. What I want to do isn’t only possible; it’s often available by default without custom configuration. Why, oh why, didn’t I look this up earlier?! I figured I’d dump a few recent favorites in case they help anyone else.
Codex TUI has a built-in shortcut for copying the last answer to clipboard: Ctrl+O.
Combine this with an alias to put it into Vim for easy pinpoint copying and remixing (-R is for read-only, so you’re not warned about unsaved changes on exit):
alias vio='pbpaste | nvim -R -'
Codex renders answers as a terminal-friendly form of Markdown, which is usually what you want because it looks nicer. However, you occasionally want the raw Markdown to copy something like a table or code block. There’s another built-in for this: Alt-R.
It toggles raw mode. Alt-R again toggles it back.
(Ctrl+O above also copies raw Markdown, but sometimes it’s faster to use Alt-R if you just want to select one segment.)
For more than a decade I’ve had my Caps Lock remapped to Escape so I can use it as an easy Tmux prefix. More recently, I’ve been using Tmux less, but I still hit Caps Lock constantly from muscle memory, and when Codex TUI is active, this has the undesirable effect of Escape cancelling the current operation.
Escape is never what I want to use to cancel an operation anyway. Just like in Vim, Ctrl+C is the more keyboardist-friendly shortcut and works in Codex TUI too.
This addition to ~/.codex/config.toml will disable Escape but leave Ctrl+C working:
[tui.keymap.chat]
interrupt_turn = []
Did I make a mistake? Please consider sending a pull request.