Codex desktop chat renders fenced code blocks in a proportional font
What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?
26.818.61809 (7019), bundled codex-cli 0.149.0-alpha.4.3
What subscription do you have?
Not relevant / unknown
What platform is your computer?
macOS 26.6.2 (Build 25G83)
What issue are you seeing?
Fenced Markdown code blocks in Codex desktop chat render using a proportional UI font instead of a fixed-width/monospace code font.
The app recognizes the content as a code block (it displays the code-block container and copy button), but the glyph widths are proportional. This breaks column alignment in ASCII trees, tables, diagrams, and any whitespace-aligned plain text.
This occurs with both an untyped fenced block and a fenced text block.
What steps can reproduce the bug?
- Open a Codex desktop task.
- Ask Codex to return this inside a fenced Markdown block, first without a language and then using ```text:
LLM runtime
│
└── Agent harness
├── MCP → Search
└── MCP → Browser
- Compare the widths of narrow and wide glyphs, or inspect whether the tree connectors remain vertically aligned.
- Observe that the block uses proportional typography and its columns do not align.
What is the expected behavior?
All fenced code blocks, including plain-text blocks, should use the configured Code font and render with fixed-width glyphs so whitespace alignment is preserved.
Additional information
The same content was re-rendered using both untyped and text fences with the same result. The code-block chrome appears correctly, so this looks like a font-family inheritance or code-font application problem in the chat renderer rather than Markdown parsing.
A screenshot demonstrating the issue is available from the originating Codex task but could not be attached through the issue API.
1 Comment
Additional diagnostic: this appears to be task-specific rather than a global font setting. Other Codex chats viewed on the same app installation render code blocks in monospace correctly; only this conversation has shown proportional rendering. The same task reproduced the issue with both unlabeled and
textfences, suggesting persisted per-task renderer/style state rather than a problem with the Markdown fence itself.<img width="2008" height="978" alt="Codex desktop code block rendering in a proportional font" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/fca9b8ac-3110-45ca-8de7-0356a67eb514" />