[CLI] TUI clips long responses without scrollable conversation history

Codex Codex CLI
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1

Summary

In Codex CLI, long responses in the interactive TUI can be clipped and become inaccessible.

Environment

  • Codex CLI version: 0.142.3
  • Mode: interactive TUI
  • OS/platform: Linux/Windows/macOS

Issue

When the assistant produces a long response that exceeds the terminal viewport height, earlier parts of the response can be lost or inaccessible. The TUI does not appear to provide a scrollable conversation history or offscreen buffer for long rendered responses.

Expected behavior

Long responses should remain available in a scrollable conversation history. Users should be able to review the full response after it finishes rendering, using normal scrollback, mouse wheel, PageUp/PageDown, or similar TUI navigation.

2

A useful repro matrix here would separate two things that often get mixed together: whether the response is persisted, and whether the current viewport can navigate back to it.

I would test with a deliberately long deterministic prompt, then check:

  • stream completes and the full assistant message is still in the conversation state
  • PageUp/PageDown or mouse wheel can reach the first paragraph after completion
  • terminal resize does not drop earlier rendered lines
  • copying/exporting the final response includes the clipped section
  • a new turn after the long response does not make the older text unreachable

That would make the bug easier to pin down as TUI buffer/navigation versus model output length.

3

Thanks, that’s a useful distinction. After more testing, I realized this appears to be specific to Cursor’s embedded terminal, not Codex CLI generally and not VS Code’s embedded terminal.

Sorry for the noise here. I’ll take this to the Cursor forum and file it there as a Cursor embedded-terminal bug report instead.