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Codex Issues / #39896

Chat filed UI/UX improvement

Open 💬 2 comments Opened Aug 21, 2026 by anfedoro
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (github-actions[bot], contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

What variant of Codex are you using?

Mac OS ChatGPT App, Version 26.818.21641

What feature would you like to see?

Feature requests: prompt navigation and better visual distinction for user messages

I have two related usability requests for navigating long conversations.

1. Keyboard shortcut to jump between my prompts

It would be extremely useful to have a keyboard shortcut such as Cmd + Up / Cmd + Down to jump directly between my previous prompts in the conversation.

The behavior I have in mind is similar to navigating command history in a terminal, except here the goal is navigation rather than editing: pressing the shortcut would jump to the beginning of my previous prompt, making it easy to start reading the corresponding LLM response from the top.

In long conversations, this would be much faster and more precise than scrolling manually.

2. Configurable color for user prompts

Please add an option in Themes / Appearance to give user messages a clearly different background color.

Currently, user prompts are only slightly distinguished with a gray background, which makes them surprisingly difficult to locate visually in long conversations.

The older/classic ChatGPT interface allowed the user-message color to be customized, and that made scanning conversation history much easier. Even a simple configurable accent/background color for user prompts would significantly improve readability.

Additional information

_No response_

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2 Comments

github-actions[bot] contributor · 7 days ago

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

  • #38594

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gift-is-coding · 1 hour ago

Adding a closely related macOS use case observed in Codex App 26.814.41407.

After a long, tool-heavy task completes, the viewport is left near the bottom of the conversation or final response. To read the result from the beginning, the user must manually scroll upward and locate the first line of the final assistant response.

Suggested behavior:

  1. Provide a “Jump to final response” action when a turn completes.
  2. Expose the same action in the command palette and Keyboard Shortcuts settings.
  3. Scroll the beginning of the latest final assistant response into view—not merely the bottom of the conversation.
  4. Do not force-scroll while the response is streaming.
  5. Preserve the user’s position if they have deliberately scrolled elsewhere; a persistent button is safer than unconditional automatic scrolling.

Suggested acceptance tests:

  • A response longer than one viewport can be opened at its first line with one action.
  • Tool-heavy turns with collapsed activity navigate to the final answer, not the activity log.
  • Manually scrolling during generation is not overridden.
  • The command is keyboard-accessible and works on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

This complements the proposed prompt-navigation shortcut and addresses the common completion-time case directly.