When pressing ESC ESC ESC up up enter you can't get back to the last turn - and this rollback sometimes crashes

Resolved 💬 6 comments Opened Apr 21, 2026 by dagelf Closed Jul 1, 2026

💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (github-actions[bot], contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

What issue are you seeing?

It's too easy to lose a 15+ minute run context and turn by accident and there is no way to redo it deterministically

What steps can reproduce the bug?

After a few turns, press ESC left arrow left arrow enter. Then try to go back to the turn you were on before you did this. Not possible.

What is the expected behavior?

You should be able to revert back to where you were. The visual cue says "Enter to edit message" but it doesn't say "Enter to trash all subsequent messages from transcript and logs" which is what it actually does.

Additional information

_No response_

View original on GitHub ↗

6 Comments

github-actions[bot] contributor · 4 months ago

Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.

#17243
#18708

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etraut-openai contributor · 4 months ago

This is working as intended, so I don't think we'd consider this a bug.

Do you have a better suggestion for this UX? If so, I could change this to a feature request.

dagelf · 4 months ago

You should be able to go back to where you started by purely pressing DOWN/FORWARD arrow again, Ie, if you press Esc again and go forward, it should be able to go to the messages that were there before you accidentally pressed Enter.

The real underlying problem is that there is a 1-5 second lag sometimes when pressing Esc, sometimes you press Esc to abort but Esc has mutlple functions depending on state. If you press Esc while generating, it stops generation.

In situations where people want things to stop they generally are used to lag or are unsure if they pressed it or if it worked, and they might press it 2 or more times in a row (eg ^C) - what happens if you press Esc 3 times is that you do not end up in a state where you can not use UP and DOWN arrow keys to copy previous messages, but you end up in a state where you can delete the whole tail end of your conversation before you realize that the UX is in a different state.

There's also a deeper bug here, I just ended up in a state where this happened, on the current version, by just going into this Esc Esc mode 3 times in a row:

› test

■ Conversation interrupted - tell the model what to do differently. Something went wrong? Hit /feedback to report
the issue.
Error: thread/rollback failed in TUI

So there's also still a real bug here, in addition to the bad UX which seems to be by design. I'm sure you can fuzz it in 5 minutes by just using Esc and the arrow keys. My PRs that took me days, got rejected, but maybe if you invite me to contribute you can get some more public service from me.

etraut-openai contributor · 1 month ago

This feature request hasn't received enough upvotes, so it is being closed automatically. If you still feel this feature is needed, please open a new feature request with an updated title and description.

iamezcua-dev · 22 days ago

Aren't the individuals in OpenAI who frequently criticize RFCs the ones who actually utilize Codex or similar tools? It appears that you disregard user opinions unless there is a quorum requesting them.

dagelf · 20 days ago

Just because every bitten by the "lag + Esc has mutlple functions depending on state" are annoyed enough to quit codex, or disempowered enough to not file a bug or look for some voting thing nobody ever heard about and vote or not vote ont it, doesn't mean it doesn't happen. TIL Oopenai has some voting system somewhere, good luck finding it, the user is the product... so why care, let the user do all the work... or flock to whoever cares.