Restore previous chat on restart/update

Open 💬 7 comments Opened May 27, 2026 by Frulfump
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (github-actions[bot], contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

What variant of Codex are you using?

App

What feature would you like to see?

Restore previous chat on restart/update, ideally an option. For me it would be best if the default was changed but that might not be best for the majority.

Additional information

Currently it doesn't remember the text that's in the input box if you restart either normally or press the update button. So if you've prepared a long message it's just deleted

View original on GitHub ↗

7 Comments

github-actions[bot] contributor · 1 month ago

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

  • #23378

Powered by Codex Action

Frulfump · 1 month ago
Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate. * Codex does not remember the last chat opened in that workspace/window #23378 _Powered by Codex Action_

Not dupe, that's for extension and this one is for the app.

etraut-openai contributor · 1 month ago

Can you say more about what you mean by "restore previous chat"? Do you mean that you want the active selection to be restored after restart? Or do you mean that if a thread was in the middle of a turn and was interrupted at the time the app quit, you want a new turn to be initiated when the app is restarted?

Frulfump · 1 month ago

The active selection yes. I haven't considered the middle of a turn scenario that hasn't happened to me yet. UPDATE: For the middle of a turn scenario I'd like a resume button or something similar for affected threads, possibly a resume all if there was multiple sessions in-progress.

SylvainWinning · 1 month ago

The clarification above makes this feel like two separable requests that may deserve different behavior:

  1. restore the last selected/open thread per app window/workspace after restart or update;
  2. preserve unsent composer draft text for that thread/window.

The second one is the highest data-loss risk: losing a long unsent prompt on update/restart is surprising even if the app intentionally does not auto-resume interrupted turns.

A narrow MVP could avoid the more complex “resume all running turns” behavior and just persist:

  • last active thread id per workspace/window;
  • composer draft text keyed by thread id;
  • clear the draft once it is submitted or manually discarded.

That would address the reported loss while leaving interrupted-turn restart semantics as a separate product decision.

etraut-openai contributor · 1 month ago

@SylvainWinning, please don't post AI-generated answers to our issue tracker. You're generating noise that is not helpful.

Frulfump · 1 month ago

This seems to restore the chat box contents when I navigate back to a thread after a restart in 26.527 but I haven't seen any release note or otherwise so it might be an accident that it's working correctly right now