Add global search across thread titles and conversation content
What variant of Codex are you using?
App
What feature would you like to see?
I’d like Codex to support global search across both thread titles and conversation content in history.
Right now, it is hard to revisit a task I worked on before unless I already remember the exact thread name. In many cases, I only remember a command, message, or a specific detail from the conversation itself.
It would be much more useful if search could help users find previous work by searching not only thread names, but also the content inside threads.
Suggested behavior:
- Search thread titles
- Search message content inside threads
- Show matched snippets in results
- Jump directly to the matched message or relevant place in the thread
- Rank results by relevance and recency
Use cases
- I want to find a previous task, but I do not remember the thread title
- I remember an error message, command, file path, or implementation detail from an earlier conversation
- I want to revisit the details of a task I completed before and reuse the previous context
Why this would help
Codex is often used for ongoing, multi-step work over time. As the number of threads grows, history becomes much harder to navigate without search over actual conversation content.
Searching titles alone is not enough, because users often remember the substance of the work rather than the exact thread name.
This feature would make it much easier to recover context, inspect prior solutions, and continue earlier work efficiently.
Additional information
_No response_
10 Comments
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This request is broader than only searching thread names or fixing
cmd+kthread search.What I’m specifically asking for is global search across:
+1 from me
+1
The Tasks list is currently only searchable by task (chat) title.
from mjabara:
+1 on this. Searching thread titles alone makes it really easy to lose earlier work, and being able to search the content inside threads, e.g., commands, error messages, file paths, would make Codex far more usable in longer running projects. If the team picks this up, it would be hugely appreciated. Thanks for considering it.
For anyone interested, I have made a program which allows you to search, read and rename your Codex threads. It's a work in progress, but I use it 20 times a day.
https://github.com/daxliniere/VS-Codex-Thread-Tools-renamer-search
This works now.
Adding one more concrete search gap from Codex Desktop on Windows.
The current global search is already useful for message text and chat/thread titles, but it does not appear to match project/workspace names. In a multi-project setup, I often remember the project name first, not the exact chat title or message text.
Expected behavior:
This would make the existing global search much more useful as a project switcher/history finder, especially when there are many projects with similarly named chats.
One important extension: this should be semantic / natural-language search, not only literal keyword matching.
A real example from my workflow: I remembered that an assistant had made a funny remark about buying three broken Anbernic consoles. I also remembered that the conversation contained photos and a discussion about “Plus” versus “2024” models, but I did not remember the conversation title or the exact sentence. Keyword search mostly surfaced a later thread where I had tried to locate it, rather than the original source. An LLM-assisted locator was able to combine the partial memories, inspect candidate history, and recover the exact conversation and phrase.
Suggested behavior:
This would make search useful when users remember the meaning and surrounding context, which is often much more likely than remembering the exact words. It can also be efficient: a small/fast model only needs to rerank a narrow lexical/vector candidate set.