Feature request: colored TUI status line style

Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened Apr 28, 2026 by wesleysmyth Closed May 2, 2026

💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (etraut-openai, contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

Feature request

Codex already lets users choose TUI status line fields via tui.status_line, but the rendered line is muted/monochrome. Dense status lines are much easier to scan when fields like model, cwd, git branch, rate limits, and context usage carry semantic color.

Proposed behavior

Add an opt-in style option that preserves the current default:

[tui]
status_line = [
  "project-name",
  "current-dir",
  "git-branch",
  "model-with-reasoning",
  "five-hour-limit",
  "weekly-limit",
  "context-remaining",
  "used-tokens",
]
status_line_style = "colored"

I prepared an upstream-ready branch on my fork:

Branch: wesleysmyth:codex/statusline-colored-style
Compare: https://github.com/openai/codex/compare/main...wesleysmyth:codex/statusline-colored-style?expand=1

The branch adds tui.status_line_style = "colored", renders configured status line segments as styled spans using Codex's approved TUI palette, updates the generated config schema/docs, and adds config/render tests.

Validation run on the branch

just fmt
just write-config-schema
just fix -p codex-tui
cargo test -p codex-tui
cargo test -p codex-core tui_status_line_style_deserializes_from_toml

I tried to open a draft PR from the fork, but GitHub rejected CreatePullRequest for my account/token against openai/codex even though the fork branch is public.

View original on GitHub ↗

3 Comments

etraut-openai contributor · 4 months ago

I've been playing around with a similar feature. Please take a look at this PR and let me know what you think.

One of the things we're discussing is whether to make it configurable (as you're proposing) or always apply colors. My inclination is to release it without configurability first and then get user feedback. Every configuration knob that we add increases imposes a cost for maintenance, backward compatibility, documentation, etc.

ipyguru · 3 months ago

I believe it would be more correct to allow the user to fully customize the statusline as is done in Claude Code.

etraut-openai contributor · 3 months ago

This will be included in the next release.