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Codex Issues / #23462

Windows Desktop: project sidebar organized by project may sort by hidden path instead of visible project name

Open 💬 3 comments Opened May 19, 2026 by claell
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (github-actions[bot], contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

What version of the Codex App are you using?

Observed from the running Windows desktop process:

  • Codex Desktop package path: OpenAI.Codex_26.513.4821.0_x64__2p2nqsd0c76g0
  • Codex.exe ProductVersion: 26.513.40821
  • Codex.exe FileVersion: 2886
  • bundled/runtime codex.exe: 0.131.0-alpha.9

What subscription do you have?

Not included in this report.

What platform is your computer?

Windows 11 x64.

Local version details:

  • Windows release: 25H2
  • Build: 26200.8457
  • Note: the legacy Windows registry ProductName field reports Windows 10 Education on this machine, but the user confirms this is Windows 11; the build number is the useful signal.

What issue are you seeing?

After a Codex Desktop update roughly a week ago, the top-level project list in the left sidebar is no longer ordered in any recognizable way.

This is not the same symptom as older chats being hidden, projects showing No chats, or the known recent-window/sidebar-history issues. The project entries are visible, but their order appears scrambled.

Previously, projects appeared with the newest / most recently active project first, top-down. Now the visible projects are not sorted by:

  • recency / last activity
  • project name alphabetically
  • creation order, as far as the user can tell

The order appears arbitrary and makes the project sidebar harder to scan, because recently used projects are no longer predictably near the top.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

A precise clean-room repro is not available yet, but the observed flow is:

  1. Use Codex Desktop on Windows with multiple projects in the left sidebar.
  2. Update/restart Codex Desktop after a recent update.
  3. Open the project sidebar.
  4. Observe that top-level project entries are visible, but no longer appear newest-first.
  5. Compare the visible order against project names and recent activity; it is neither chronological nor alphabetical.

What is the expected behavior?

The project list should have a stable, understandable ordering.

At minimum, it should preserve the previous behavior: newest / most recently active project first, descending. If a different ordering is intentional, the UI should expose or document it clearly.

What actually happened?

The top-level project list appears in an arbitrary/scrambled order after the update. Visible projects are not hidden, but they are no longer ordered by recency or alphabetically.

Why this seems distinct from existing sidebar history bugs

There are several existing reports about missing or hidden project conversations, recent-window limits, and sidebar search not finding old threads. This report is narrower: it is about the ordering of visible top-level projects.

Related but different reports include:

  • #21128: Codex Desktop silently hides project conversations outside the global recent-50 window
  • #20254: Windows Codex Desktop sidebar hides valid local project threads while SQLite and rollout files are intact
  • #17540: Windows app: older local threads disappear from sidebar and sidebar search after restart while still present on disk
  • #19290: Windows Desktop sidebar shows No chats and no projects after update, but Search can still find/open existing chats

Those may share underlying sidebar/list-model code, but this issue is specifically about visible projects being unordered rather than hidden.

View original on GitHub ↗

3 Comments

github-actions[bot] contributor · 3 months ago

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

  • ##22487
  • ##21680

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claell · 3 months ago

Additional clarification from testing:

This appears to be tied to the sidebar organization/sort settings rather than being fully random.

In the German UI, Seitenleiste organisieren includes options such as Nach Projekt, Kürzlich aktive Projekte, and Chronologische Liste. Separately, Sortieren nach includes Erstellt and Aktualisiert.

Current theory: when the sidebar is organized by project (Nach Projekt), the project list may be sorted by an underlying project path rather than the visible project name/title. If so, the list is technically sorted, but by a hidden key, which makes the order look scrambled in the UI.

Expected behavior: in Nach Projekt mode, sort projects by the visible project name/title, or make the actual sort key clear in the UI.

Sorting by recently active projects appears to work correctly in the latest test.

claell · 2 months ago

Additional trigger found:

After signing out and signing back in again, apparently even with the same account, the project sidebar order changed again back to the unintuitive project-based ordering instead of the most-recent-project ordering.

That makes this look like the sidebar organization/sort preference may not persist correctly across sign-out/sign-in, or may be reset/recomputed after authentication state changes.

Expected behavior: signing out and back into the same account should not unexpectedly change the project sidebar ordering mode or sort order.