Clipboard paste prefers image over text when clipboard contains both

What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?

26.313.41514

What subscription do you have?

Pro

What platform is your computer?

Microsoft Windows NT 10.0.22631.0 x64

What issue are you seeing?

Summary

When the clipboard contains both text and an image, the Codex Windows app always pastes the image and ignores the text.

This is particularly easy to reproduce with Excel: copying a cell range puts multiple clipboard formats on the clipboard, including text/tabular text and an image representation. In Codex, paste always inserts the image instead of the text.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

Steps to reproduce

1. Open Microsoft Excel.
2. Select a range of cells.
3. Copy it with Ctrl+C or right-click → Copy.
4. Go to the Codex prompt input.
5. Paste with Ctrl+V.

What is the expected behavior?

Expected behavior

Codex should not always prefer the image format when text is also available.

Preferred behavior:

• paste the text/tabular text by default, or
• prompt me to choose whether to paste the text or the image.

Actual behavior

Only the image is pasted, even though textual clipboard data is also available.

Why this is a problem

For spreadsheet ranges, the text version is usually the useful one for prompting, analysis, transformation, and discussion.

Pasting the image instead:

• makes the workflow slower
• forces extra manual steps
• prevents quick text-based interaction with copied tabular data

Example repro case

Excel copied ranges are a reliable repro:

• copy any range of cells
• paste into Codex
• Codex inserts an image of the range instead of the text representation

Suggested fix

When multiple clipboard formats are available:

1. prefer text over image for normal paste into the prompt, or
2. show a small chooser such as:

• Paste as text
• Paste as image

Environment

• App: Codex Windows app
• OS: Windows

Additional information

Notes

This likely affects any source application that places both image and text representations on the clipboard, not just Excel.

<img width="638" height="993" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/ce41cd78-5e1e-41c1-9f82-81dc6d12f159" />