Option to Disable Automatic File Preview — Complicated Excel Files Freeze Codex Desktop

Codex
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  1. Codex automatically opens/render-previews complex files such as .xlsm workbooks even when the coding task only concerns VBA/Python/scripts.
  2. Rendering the workbook can freeze the Codex UI for more than a minute.
  3. Closing the preview doesn’t solve the underlying behavior because Codex may reopen it after another change.
  4. Telling the agent not to preview/open the file doesn’t prevent it, indicating that this is client UI behavior rather than agent behavior.
  5. The needed feature is simple: “Disable automatic file previews”, or alternatively “Preview files only when explicitly opened.”
  6. It needs to operate independently from Codex’s ability to read, modify, and reason about the file, because excluding the workbook from the project would destroy cross-file context.
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Thanks for flagging the workbook-preview freezes. We'll share the request to disable automatic previews while keeping file access. For the freezing issue, please send a reproducible example privately through Support: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6614161.