How to clear the current user input

Resolved 💬 6 comments Opened Feb 5, 2026 by MNeMoNiCuZ Closed Mar 20, 2026

💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (etraut-openai, contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

What variant of Codex are you using?

CLI

What feature would you like to see?

When I have pasted a message, I'm not able to erase my entire message to write something else. Like I can hold down ALT + DELETE to delete one word at a time, but this is not great with huge messages. I have to sit there for 20 seconds holding down the key. We need a better solution. And also please add support for operating-system hotkey!
i.e. CTRL + ARROW KEYS on Win, and ALT + ARROW KEYS on Linux. And support CTRL + SHIFT + END / CTRL + SHIFT + HOME to select text to delete, or something like this.

Additional information

_No response_

View original on GitHub ↗

6 Comments

etraut-openai contributor · 5 months ago

I think you're looking for Ctrl+C. Does that work for you?

jonbelay · 5 months ago

Thanks for flagging this. To help us reproduce and prioritize:\n\n1. What environment are you using (OS, version, and install method)?\n2. What exact command or config triggers the issue?\n3. Can you share logs or error output if available?\n\nWe will update the proposal once we have the missing details.

MNeMoNiCuZ · 5 months ago

Huh, did I not already reply to this? I can't see the message I already left here.

CTRL + C works and it's what I'm looking for, but this is not intuitive for a windows user.
CTRL + C usually closes our tools and programs.

If I type ? for shortcuts, it mentions ctrl + c to exit.

I get that there's a threshold to using CLI tools. But let's see what makes sense per OS perhaps.

I'm using Windows 11 here. Install method I have no idea, I ran some command, npm maybe?
What do you mean? I'm expecting that inputs would act and behave the same way as my GUI
Again, what do you mean? This is nothing with logs... I'm talking about a feature request with missing functionality, not a bug. It's missing expected default behaviors.

Another similar problem, now that I opened the ? help menu, it doesn't say how to close it. I pressed ESC, and this CANCELS the current command by the agent instead of closing this menu. BACKSPACE closes it, but this is not mentioned in the menu. And pressing ? again does not close it.

etraut-openai contributor · 4 months ago

This feature request hasn't received enough upvotes, so closing.

mstrap · 2 months ago

This happens to me quite frequently as well. Ctrl+U is somewhat of a relief, but for multi-line input it still requires deleting line by line. I would really like to have a shortcut such as Ctrl+Shift+U to delete the entire current input buffer at once.

DanyLinuxoid · 12 hours ago

I join on this.

Sometimes when CLI hangs up and I press ``Ctrl+C`` multiple times, CLI can just leave previous text or some other random text in terminal, and in order to write something new for model correction, I firstly have to delete everything in terminal, but if previously I pasted big JSON config or task, that I was writing for 40 minutes+, then good luck in deleting all of this 💀

Came here while searching on how I can erase everything with one click/shortcut.
In terminal found no ways of doing so...