Support Option+backspace to delete previous word
Resolved 💬 7 comments Opened Jan 13, 2026 by renanliberato Closed Jan 15, 2026
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (etraut-openai, contributor)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
What version of Codex is running?
0.80.0
What subscription do you have?
Plus
Which model were you using?
gpt-5.2-codex
What platform is your computer?
Darwin 23.6.0 arm64 arm
What issue are you seeing?
When I press Option+Backspace, instead of deleting a whole word like on other apps, codex deletes just a character, making it painfully slow to rewrite sentences
What steps can reproduce the bug?
type a phrase like "hello world" and hit Option+Backspace. The typed text becomes "hello worl".
What is the expected behavior?
It should become "hello ", deleting the whole word.
Additional information
_No response_
7 Comments
Hi @etraut-openai nice to meet you
May I work on this issue?
Thank you
Oh damn, you guys are fast. I started working on it yesterday after opening the issue but needed to rent a machine with better spects to be able to build/test it today, after work 😅 fork commit
On the face of it, this sounds like an easy bug to fix, but it turns out to be quite complex. Please refer to this thread for additional details.
@renanliberato haha yeah, you were fast too 😅 turns out macOS Terminal.app doesn’t actually report Option or Option+Shift for Backspace at all, so Codex can’t see the combo and the fix needs deeper terminal level investigation.
Ok, after reading the new threads and doing some web search about MacOS terminal relationship with modifiers (like this crossterm issue), I'm convinced it's more a terminal setup issue than Codex itself.
When running codex CLI via Terminal.app the word deletion works as long as "Use Option as Meta key" is enabled in the app settings.
The wrong behaviour I was seeing was because I was running codex CLI via Ghostty, but it started working as soon as I added "macos-option-as-alt = left" to the config file (learned about it here).
IIRC Claude Code has some FTUE that manipulate the terminal keybindings/settings to work well with the app, but not sure if you guys want to do something like that on Codex (like suggesting to enable these options if they're disabled etc)
Feel free to close as it's not a bug itself as I initially thought 🙇♂️
I agree it's not the the codex keybinding issue, i had same problems with iTerm 2 but it was the profile issue at my end.
@etraut-openai please feel free to close this issue it is solved from my end. @renanliberato Thank you for your feedback