Login menu doesn't work with terminal that has few rows
Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened Dec 17, 2025 by johann-petrak Closed Mar 29, 2026
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (etraut-openai, contributor)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
What version of Codex is running?
codex-cli 0.73.0
What subscription do you have?
None, pay as you go
Which model were you using?
none
What platform is your computer?
Ubuntu 24.04
What issue are you seeing?
When starting codex it tells me that it can be used with a plan or with an API key, but then there is no option to make it work with an API key.
All other alternatives like Gemini and Claude support this without problems.
What steps can reproduce the bug?
Just running it
What is the expected behavior?
Work with API keys as explicitly stated in the greeting text
Additional information
_No response_
3 Comments
Many codex users use API Keys, so this is definitely something that's supported.
Can you provide more details about what's not working (the behavior you see)? For example, do you see an error message when you enter a prompt? What steps you've tried? Are you sure you're entering a valid OpenAI API Key?
Apologies, I think this is actually just a small usability issue, with me jumping to conclusions, as the 2nd option in the start screen does not get shown in a terminal with too few rows:
When I ran codex for the first time, I get the screen that tells me that I can choose between logging in and using an API key then option 1. for logging in is shown, nothing else. When trying to scroll to another option using the cursor up/down keys, nothing happens.
TURNS OUT, this happens if your terminal has not enough rows to show option 2 as well: there is no way to scroll to the off-screen option in that case.
It would perhaps be good to handle situations with terminals that do not have enough rows better.
This bug report hasn't received any upvotes or additional posts in three months. Closing.