Control over color theme in TUI
Resolved 💬 31 comments Opened Jul 18, 2025 by doggy8088 Closed Feb 23, 2026
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (etraut-openai, contributor)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
The color theme of the Codex CLI is a MUST for customization.
31 Comments
Something similar to “posting”
At the moment when using codex in a little bit dark terminal (warp) but with the background looking kind of gray then the cursor which is black is completely not visible Just take a look at the screen.
level easy ->
<img width="364" height="69" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/5bddaac4-593d-4f69-80a4-5634e47b0f0d" />
level hard ->
<img width="355" height="90" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/e294758a-9010-49bc-98aa-e18a8645a5da" />
Can you see it? Yeah, I can't. :) But believe me, it's there.
So the question is, can I somehow customize the colors for the Codex CLI agent app?
Customization is one thing, but another thing is that the default color scheme is not great. OpenAI should improve it.
Coming from Claude Code, I find that Codex's color scheme makes text harder to read.
I support it. Current theme is totally unreadable. I understand that's a design language of OpenAI, but it's not a good fit for terminal development. No shame in copying from Claude Code, or allowing users to set some color codes for similar to CC "settings.json" file.
Google's gemini-cli has some great support for color themes as well, under the
/themecommand.Color improvements will probably come after the release of GPT-6.
<img width="835" height="456" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/61737421-f2a2-4b27-96c6-8487a585bff6" />
Here's how it looks for me after update. 100% unusable
Edit: works with
export TERM=dumbwhich loses me other syntax highlightingI had the same, solved it by restarting the terminal app
yes this is painful, I can barely read in darkmode
<img width="1919" height="529" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/b2c7a533-4dfb-4707-8501-612298d51e04" />
ahh this is intentional, how unfortunate
<img width="1271" height="366" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/e57c0e90-af24-4e22-b0eb-56e5516b9742" />
for those who simply cannot live with it, clone the repo, get
rustupgoing on your machine, run this command:rg -l --fixed-strings '.dim()' | xargs -r sed -i 's/\.dim()/\.light_cyan()/g'followed bycargo run --bin codexinside ofcodex/codex-rs- it doesn't take that long and it sure is an improvement.<img width="864" height="530" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/0e5525d8-4ec2-4042-8fde-c5ad8b432360" />
edit: you'll wanna add it to your PATH then too....
使用 codex 修改了 codex 配色。但它的总结内容，还是没有 claude code 那样易读。
<img width="808" height="741" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/b8f1da35-e3d9-44ee-b636-728a90bec005" />
To be honest, this display style is already excellent compared to the existing one.
Competitors, like Gemini, offer a vastly superior customization experience with
/themeand offer fully comprehensive customization options as well.``
json
``{
"AccentBlue": "#519BFF",
"AccentCyan": "#5ABAAE",
"AccentGreen": "#53D390",
"AccentPurple": "#C28EFF",
"AccentRed": "#D06666",
"AccentYellow": "#F0E68C",
"Background": "#101825",
"Comment": "#467B99",
"DiffAdded": "#8DCD7E",
"DiffModified": "#D4A017",
"DiffRemoved": "#A23B3B",
"Foreground": "#D9E6FA",
"GradientColors": [
"#1CA0FD",
"#FFA0A0",
"#FFA247"
],
"Gray": "#30556d",
"LightBlue": "#87CEEB",
"name": "Oasis Lagoon",
"type": "custom"
}
---
This level of customization is the bar set by competitors. This should be the bar that Codex aims to reach at the very minimum if Codex wants to consider itself a competitor.
I implemented /themes (theme selection + theming support) in my fork, xCodex (xcodex).
xCodex only (WIP): https://github.com/Eriz1818/xCodex
Docs: https://github.com/Eriz1818/xCodex/blob/main/docs/xcodex/themes.md
What it adds:
Example (config):
[themes]
dir = "$CODEX_HOME/themes"
theme_mode = "auto" # auto|light|dark
light = "default"
dark = "default"
Notes:
Will you open a pull request to this feature?
@Chavao, this feature needs to be designed before we jump into an implementation. If you'd like to suggest a design proposal, you could post here in this thread.
@Chavao According to the contribution guidelines, Codex doesn't allow PRs for features. So, unfortunately, no.
I have read their reasoning in the relevant markdown document still seems not ideal solution. At least you can adapt something similar to the policy of Ghostty codebase where you get vouched after you provided reasonable outline for your contribution through discussions. This seems like redundant gatekeeping slowing down potentially good PRs
I second this. codex should at least give the possibility to use ANSI colors. The hardcoding is terrible
Control over themes is included in the next release. Currently, the theming is focused on syntax highlighting for code. We are considering extending this to other aspects of the TUI. If you have specific ideas, please open new feature requests. Looking forward to your input!
Just updated. Full line colours in windows cmd hurt my eyes (especially red) across the board with all themes available. 🥺
Is this as intended ?
<img width="1221" height="270" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/6b5428e9-61cd-406d-baad-66a7140b4956" />
Exactly, it looks awful. If you browse to /theme, some themes don't show any difference. I believe this is some kind of bug.
I now see the mention that it's fixed in codex-rs/tui/src/diff_render.rs here
This is closed? I still can't see /theme
@mortalnow, which version of the CLI are you using? The
/themeslash command was added several weeks ago.<img width="435" height="90" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/d5180ec7-2ca7-4a53-ae14-f7a6c9b232ae" />
Thanks, Eric. My mistake—I’ve enabled auto-upgrade.
<img width="427" height="111" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/ec9a44e9-a472-44d3-b25d-45dc8b43e1c4" />
how do I read this? I'm on codex-cli 0.114.0
Same issue here...
<img width="206" height="90" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/8901fc39-4048-4569-a0e1-76ee647606b9" />
With a light theme, the suggestions are almost indistinguishable from the actual text. Moreover, suggestions are more prominent (darker). This is very confusing.
This is a suggestion:
<img width="384" height="111" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/516665ed-d2a9-44e0-826c-362120b25a6d" />
This is actual text:
<img width="384" height="113" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/fc115045-87df-44c1-9cf4-65ff3ee41511" />
I'm on windows terminal, using a gruvbox light theme. For nearly all themes, the full-line highlights make the code hard to read.
<img width="931" height="185" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/6157592e-d822-4849-955d-08c3e2d705a8" />
The /theme command only modifies the code highlighting style and has no effect on the highlighting theme of the TUI.