Your competitor, “IntelliJ Air”, has a very useful feature: it allows multiple instances to be opened, each one focused on a different workspace or repository.
This makes it very convenient to organize work. For example, on one virtual desktop I can have a setup consisting of IntelliJ Air + IntelliJ working on repository A, such as the frontend of a system.
On another virtual desktop, I can have another instance of IntelliJ Air + IntelliJ working on the backend.
This is not possible with Codex. Instead, I either have to pin the app across all virtual desktops or keep moving it between them, which is much less practical.
Consider it please 
Thanks!
You can have multiple Codex CLI sessions open via multiple terminals of course … (but doesn’t help you with the app)
@Roque_Campos_Parada totally get why this feels limiting… that multi-instance setup is a really clean way to stay organized across repos and desktops.
Right now, Codex doesn’t support multiple app instances per workspace, so what you’re trying to do isn’t possible in the same way. The current limitation is the app runs as a single instance, which is why you end up pinning or moving it around.
A few folks have been working around it with:
- separate browser profiles (each acts like its own “instance”)
- mixing CLI sessions + app depending on the task
Not ideal, agreed. This is a solid use case though and worth pushing on. I’ll echo this so it gets logged.
@merefield you’re spot on about the CLI sessions. That’s been the closest workaround so far, just doesn’t fully cover the app experience yet.
Feels like this is one of those gaps where workflows outgrew the current setup.
-Mark G
We use codex to develop a unity game and unity forces us to only have a single unity instance running. We found that the best way to solve parallelization is using Github actions. We setup a bunch of mac minis as free self-hosted runners on Github, that way we use our Chatgpt accounts on Github actions without additional cost.
not sure how related is this to the original post [I hope it is somewhat related]
I am working with multiple virtual desktops in windows 11 [win+tab] each one has its own vs code instance opening its own workspace dir and having its own unique codex [vs code extension] chat thread.
this has been working ok in recent month, I’ve always had 4 such instances running in parallel doing tasks on different workspaces non-stop. sometimes I even add the windows store codex app outside of vs code.
this week a huge instability started and seems to me that now only 1 instance can run at any given time, like a regression of how it was already supported to not being supported. I can’t open codex windows-store app together with vs code codex extension chat and have both of them run at the same time. I can even no longer have mutiple codex vs code extension threads do work at the same time or even “login” (show the chat’s context after a first vs code launch) if another thread is already connected on another instance.
Just couple of days ago this worked perfectly fine.
- I did add logs to any on going tasks for any of the threads doing work, seems like they actually sometimes accept my requests and start doing detached work without me being able to track their progress anymore, but crash on the vs code extension UI