Bash mode history
Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened Apr 26, 2026 by tom-huntington Closed Apr 27, 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?
Once in bash mode, I would like to be able to press up on by keyboard to get recent commands.
I would like the history of previous commands, to persist even after starting a new session /new
P.S. Maybe should should rename it shell mode for windows powershell users.
Additional information
_No response_
3 Comments
Thanks for the suggestion. I agree on both accounts — this should be called "Shell mode", and these commands should be saved into the global history buffer.
This will be addressed in the next release.
Thanks! This will be appreciated.
You asked my thoughts in https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/17515
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Codex TUI should be more explicitly modal (i.e. vim/kakoune/helix) imo.
If you are writing your prompt (insert mode), you can press escape to enter normal mode, from where you can enter shell mode with
!or command mode with/You have a list of buffers (either prompts or shell mode commands) that you can edit/rerun and reorder. At the moment, you can only build a request in the form
user_shell_command* user_message.In normal mode, you can change which of the buffers is focused.
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The current UX where
!and/from a empty prompt, send you into their respective modes is good. You could preserve this happy path, while adding more advanced functionality.