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## Why The Codex App has animated pets, but the TUI had no equivalent ambient companion surface. This brings that experience into terminal Codex while keeping the main chat flow usable: the pet should feel present, but it cannot cover transcript text, composer input, approvals, or picker content. The feature also needs to be terminal-aware. Different terminals support different image protocols, tmux can interfere with image rendering, and some users will want pets disabled entirely or anchored differently depending on their layout. <table> <tr><td> <img width="4110" height="2584" alt="CleanShot 2026-05-05 at 12 41 45@2x" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/68a1fcbc-2104-48d6-b834-69c6aaa95cdf" /> <p align="center">macOS - Ghostty, iTerm2 and WezTerm with Custom Pet</p> </td></tr> <tr><td> ![Uploading CleanShot 2026-05-10 at 20.28.30.png…]() <p align="center">Windows Terminal</p> </td></tr> <tr><td> <img width="3902" height="2752" alt="CleanShot 2026-05-05 at 12 39 02@2x" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/300e2931-6b00-467e-91cb-ab8e28470500" /> <p align="center">Linux - WezTerm and Ghostty</p> </td></tr> </table> ## What Changed - Add a TUI ambient pet renderer in `codex-rs/tui/src/pets/`. - Port the app-style pet animation states so the sprite changes with task status, waiting-for-input states, review/ready states, and failures. - Add `/pets` selection UI with a preview pane, loading state, built-in pet choices, and a first-row `Disable terminal pets` option. - Download built-in pet spritesheets on demand from the same public CDN path already used by Android, under `https://persistent.oaistatic.com/codex/pets/v1/...`, and cache them locally under `~/.codex/cache/tui-pets/`. - Keep custom pets local. - Add config support for pet selection, disabling pets, and choosing whether the pet follows the composer bottom or anchors to the terminal bottom. - Reserve layout space around the pet so transcript wrapping, live responses, and composer input do not render underneath the sprite. - Gate image rendering by terminal capability, disable image pets under tmux, and support both Kitty Graphics and SIXEL terminals. - Add redraw cleanup for terminal image artifacts, including sixel cell clearing. ## Current Scope - This is an initial TUI version of ambient pets, not full App parity. - It focuses on ambient sprite rendering, `/pets` selection, custom pets, terminal capability gating, and on-demand CDN-backed built-in assets. - The ambient text overlay is currently disabled, so the TUI renders the pet sprite without extra status text beside it. ## How to Test 1. Start Codex TUI in a terminal with image support. 2. Run `/pets`. 3. Confirm the picker shows built-in pets plus custom pets, and the first item is `Disable terminal pets`. 4. On a fresh `~/.codex/cache/tui-pets/`, move onto a built-in pet and confirm the first preview downloads the spritesheet from the shared Codex pets CDN and renders successfully. 5. Move through the pet list and confirm subsequent built-in previews use the local cache. 6. Select a pet, then send and receive messages. Confirm transcript and composer text wrap before the pet instead of rendering underneath the sprite. 7. Change the pet anchor setting and confirm the pet can either follow the composer bottom or sit at the terminal bottom. 8. Return to `/pets`, choose `Disable terminal pets`, and confirm the sprite disappears cleanly. Targeted tests: - `cargo test -p codex-tui ambient_pet_` - `cargo test -p codex-tui resize_reflow_wraps_transcript_early_when_pet_is_enabled` - `cargo insta pending-snapshots`
Codex CLI (Rust Implementation)
We provide Codex CLI as a standalone 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 [--log-denials] [COMMAND]...
# Linux
codex sandbox linux [COMMAND]...
# Windows
codex sandbox windows [COMMAND]...
# Legacy aliases
codex debug seatbelt [--log-denials] [COMMAND]...
codex debug landlock [COMMAND]...
To try a writable legacy sandbox mode with these commands, pass an explicit config override such
as -c 'sandbox_mode="workspace-write"'.
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 becomes 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.