Add an option to hide rotating empty-composer prompt placeholders

Resolved 💬 1 comment Opened Jul 29, 2026 by RomiC Closed Aug 7, 2026
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (etraut-openai, contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

Summary

Codex CLI shows rotating prompt placeholders in an empty composer, for example: Find and fix a bug in @filename. Please add a configuration option to hide these suggestions.

Environment

  • Codex CLI: 0.146.0
  • macOS

Steps to reproduce

  1. Start codex in an interactive terminal.
  2. Leave the composer empty.
  3. Observe a rotating prompt placeholder in the input area.

Actual behavior

A suggested prompt is shown in the empty composer. Disabling tool_suggest does not remove it.

Expected behavior

Provide a configuration option (for example, tui.show_prompt_suggestions = false) to suppress the rotating placeholder while retaining the normal empty input.

Notes

This is a UI preference request. The current placeholder disappears when typing, but can be distracting in an otherwise minimal terminal UI.

View original on GitHub ↗

1 Comment

etraut-openai contributor · 21 days ago

Based on feedback, we've decided to remove the rotating placeholders, which users found confusing. We've replaced it with a generic placeholder message.