Recognize CUDA .cu and .cuh files for syntax highlighting in CLI diffs

Open 💬 0 comments Opened Jul 15, 2026 by brayden-partcl

What variant of Codex are you using?

Codex CLI (terminal UI)

What feature would you like to see?

Please recognize CUDA source and header extensions (.cu and .cuh) as C++ for syntax highlighting in CLI file diffs.

Currently, equivalent C/C++ files such as .c and .cpp receive token-level syntax highlighting, while .cu and .cuh diffs fall back to plain diff coloring.

Steps to observe:

  1. Edit a .cpp file and a .cu or .cuh file containing comparable C++ code.
  2. View both changes in the Codex CLI TUI.
  3. The .cpp diff is syntax-highlighted; the CUDA diff is not.

Expected behavior: CUDA files should receive C++ syntax highlighting as a useful fallback.

Additional information

I searched the issue tracker for existing CUDA/.cu/.cuh syntax-highlighting requests and did not find a matching issue.

The current diff renderer passes the raw path extension into syntax lookup:

https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/codex-rs/tui/src/diff_render.rs#L469-L475

The syntax resolver has a small alias map but no CUDA mapping:

https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/codex-rs/tui/src/render/highlight.rs#L521-L560

A minimal fallback could extend the existing C++ alias arm:

"cu" | "cuh" | "cppm" | "cxxm" | "ixx" => "cpp",

A custom .tmTheme cannot address this because the file extension fails syntax selection before theme colors are applied.

Observed with codex-cli 0.144.1; the same missing alias is present on current main as of 2026-07-15.

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