Delete / DEL key immediately ends session
Resolved 💬 4 comments Opened Jan 27, 2026 by aehlke Closed Apr 3, 2026
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (etraut-openai, contributor)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
What version of Codex is running?
0.91.0
What subscription do you have?
Pro
Which model were you using?
_No response_
What platform is your computer?
macOS
What terminal emulator and version are you using (if applicable)?
_No response_
What issue are you seeing?
Sometimes I accidentally press the 'delete' key when I have nothing in the prompt, and it immediately ends my session. Very frustrating and unusual behavior!
What steps can reproduce the bug?
macOS, iTerm2
What is the expected behavior?
Do nothing in response to delete key being pressed when prompt is empty!
Additional information
_No response_
4 Comments
Is this behavior new? I'm wondering if you suspect that it's a recent regression.
I'm not able to repro in the macOS Terminal. Perhaps this is specific to iTerm2 or your terminal configuration?
@etraut-openai no it's been bothering me for several weeks. at first I thought it was an iTerm2 issue but it definitely seems unique to Codex, I can't repro in other TUIs... I tried disabling the "delete" key in iTerm2 by adding a shortcut that does nothing because it also seems to sometimes close a tab, but that didn't solve this problem - it still kills sessions. Please try to repro with iTerm2 if you're able to. I can try another time on other machines but don't have easy access at the moment. thank you!
I'm not able to repro this problem with the latest Codex and iTerm2. Perhaps it was fixed, or perhaps this is specific to your terminal configuration. Do you have custom keyboard mappings for the delete key?
@etraut-openai thank you for investigating. I ended up setting a mapping to entirely disable the delete key in iterm2 because I couldn't figure out what was causing this, sorry. it's still an issue if I don't override the delete key to do nothing.