Codex Desktop: Add conversation turn navigator with jump-to-response support

What variant of Codex are you using?

App

What feature would you like to see?

What variant of Codex are you using?

Codex Desktop app

What feature would you like to see?

I’d like Codex Desktop to provide a built-in conversation navigator that indexes user inputs and lets me jump back to the corresponding response in the current thread.

A useful implementation could include:

• A sidebar or command palette view listing all user prompts in the current conversation
• Stable turn numbers or message anchors, e.g. #1, #2, #3
• Click-to-jump behavior that scrolls the Codex thread to the selected user input and its assistant response
• Search/filter over previous user inputs
• Keyboard navigation, such as “jump to turn 12” or “search previous prompts”
• Optional visual highlight after jumping so the selected turn is easy to find
• Persistence across app restarts and resumed threads

Why is this useful?

Long Codex threads often contain many implementation attempts, explanations, diffs, command outputs, and follow-up requests. When a thread grows, it becomes hard to return to a specific prior response, especially if I remember the prompt but not where it appears in the scrollback.

This would make Codex much easier to use for long-running work, debugging sessions, design iterations, and multi-step coding tasks.

Reference / prior art

I built a Chrome extension called AI Chat Conversation Navigator that solves this problem for web chat UIs:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ai-chat-conversation-navi/dpccalejgknfflhplcipeojdmdhedkhn

The extension adds a sidebar to ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini that lists user messages and lets the user click an item to scroll back to that point in the conversation.

Important behaviors from that extension that would be useful in Codex Desktop:

• Index user messages in a conversation
• Show those messages in a compact sidebar
• Click a prompt to scroll the conversation window to the matching message
• Cache conversation indexes so revisiting a thread is fast
• Handle long conversations where older messages may not all be rendered at once
• Keep the index scoped to the active conversation/thread

Suggested UX

One possible Codex Desktop UX:

• Add a “Conversation Navigator” button near the thread toolbar
• Open a right-side or left-side panel with a list of user prompts
• Each item shows:
• turn number
• short prompt preview
• timestamp, if available
• Clicking an item scrolls the thread to that user prompt and the assistant response below it
• A search field filters prompts
• A command like /jump 12 or Cmd+K -> Jump to turn could jump directly to a numbered turn

Additional context

Codex already stores local session/thread data, so the main request is for first-class UI support: expose the thread index inside Codex Desktop and connect each indexed item to scroll-to-message behavior.

Additional information

_No response_