Codex CLI

Codex CLI

Codex CLI is OpenAI's CLI coding agent. It runs as a process in its own Daintree terminal panel with full PTY emulation, like every other built-in agent.

Install & Authenticate

Install from npm: npm install -g @openai/codex. Run codex once to sign in. Codex stores its credentials in ~/.codex/auth.json, which is where Daintree looks; OPENAI_API_KEY counts as authenticated too. For details, see the Codex CLI repository.

How Daintree Launches It

Codex is one of the three agents that launch inline by default. Daintree passes --no-alt-screen, so Codex writes into Daintree's own scrollback instead of taking the alternate screen buffer — output stays scrollable and selectable with the native selection layer. Turn on "use alt-screen mode by default" globally, or flip the per-agent or per-preset override, and the flag is dropped.

Turning on permission bypass adds --dangerously-bypass-approvals-and-sandbox. Codex declares bypass support, so the global "skip permission prompts" switch reaches it as well as the per-agent toggle.

The $ picker

Codex is the agent that puts capabilities behind a $ trigger, and Daintree's unified input completes them with a category badge on each row so a skill and a plugin are distinguishable at a glance:

• Skills — directories containing a SKILL.md, read from Codex's bundled system skills, your own ~/.codex/skills, and the project's .agents/skills. Set CODEX_HOME and all three user-scoped paths follow it.
• Plugins — the enabled plugin entries in config.toml intersected with the manifests cached under plugins/cache, so only plugins that are both enabled and installed are offered.

A skill and a plugin can share a name; the skill wins the label. Codex Apps are modelled in the same picker but not yet discovered, because they resolve server-side with no local manifest to read.

The / trigger completes Codex's built-in commands, including /goal — shared with Claude Code, with Codex's own description covering its edit, pause, resume, and clear subcommands.

Resuming Sessions

Daintree captures Codex's session ID and resumes with codex resume <session-id>. Quit cleanly with /quit so the ID is captured; when it isn't, the fallback is codex resume --last. Codex keys its sessions by UUID rather than by path, so a conversation is resumable from any folder — moving or renaming a project preserves it. For the resume mechanics across all agents, see Session Resume.