Codex TUI scrollback corruption in Termius mobile SSH

Open 💬 3 comments Opened May 23, 2026 by romanaktau-ai

What happened?

When using Codex CLI through Termius on a mobile device, long Codex responses become unreadable when touch-scrolling. Lines above roughly one mobile screen disappear or are replaced by stale terminal content. The scrollback can also mix previous Codex TUI overlay content into the assistant transcript.

Observed stale/mixed content includes:

  • Ubuntu login/MOTD lines such as Memory usage: 56% and IPv4 address for eth0: ...
  • slash-command overlay text such as /raw toggle raw scrollback mode for copy-friendly terminal selection
  • approval overlay text such as Would you like to make the following edits?
  • duplicated or interrupted response lines

This makes long assistant responses effectively unreadable in Termius. The same SSH session/client works normally with Claude Code, so this appears specific to Codex TUI rendering/scrollback behavior.

Environment

  • Codex CLI: 0.133.0
  • Platform: Linux VPS over SSH
  • Terminal client: Termius mobile app
  • Shell: bash
  • TERM=xterm-256color
  • Reproduced in Codex interactive TUI

Things tried

  • Restarting Codex
  • Starting with codex --no-alt-screen --disable terminal_resize_reflow
  • Persisting config:
[features]
terminal_resize_reflow = false

[tui]
alternate_screen = "never"
raw_output_mode = true
animations = false
  • Toggling /raw on and off
  • Clearing shell scrollback before startup
  • Suppressing Ubuntu MOTD via .hushlogin

None of these fully fixed the corruption. /raw itself can later appear mixed into the scrollback as if it were part of the assistant message.

Expected behavior

Touch-scrolling in Termius should either:

  1. show the Codex transcript consistently, or
  2. not mix stale TUI frames, slash-command overlays, approval overlays, or pre-Codex shell/MOTD lines into the assistant transcript.

Actual behavior

After a long response, scrolling upward on mobile shows only the lower part of the response; earlier lines are replaced/covered by stale terminal frames or Codex overlay text. The corruption is intermittent but frequent enough to make Codex difficult to use from Termius on mobile.

Notes

This seems related to Codex TUI/rich transcript/overlay rendering and terminal scrollback interaction. Claude Code does not exhibit the same issue in the same Termius SSH workflow.

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