TUI: add Harpoon-style pinned slots for direct agent switching
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- Dominant language
- Rust
- Stars
- 125k
- Forks
- 19.4k
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Description
What variant of Codex are you using?
Codex CLI 0.150.1 (terminal TUI), using the /agents command center.
What feature would you like to see?
Add stable, user-assignable slots for active agent threads and direct keybindings to switch to them without reopening /agents each time.
Suggested interaction:
- In
/agents, assign the highlighted agent to slot 1–9 (a StarCraft control-group / Harpoon-style model). - From any agent thread, a configurable shortcut such as
Alt+1throughAlt+9switches directly to the existing thread in that slot. - A direct shortcut such as
Alt+0returns to the parent thread. - Show assigned slot numbers beside agents in the command center.
- Provide
/agent 3or an equivalent command fallback for terminals that cannot encode the configured chord. - Keep slot assignments stable when agents move between Working, Needs input, and Ready groups.
- Switching must focus the existing live thread; it must not spawn or resume a duplicate.
The current repeated workflow is:
/agents → navigate or search → Enter → repeat whenever switching tasks.
With five to eight parallel agents whose responsibilities are already known—for example, “integration tests are slot 1”—the selector interrupts flow. tmux provides instant prefix + number navigation, but using separate tmux Codex sessions loses the native task status, lifecycle, steering, and result collection that make /agents reliable.
Pinned direct-access slots would preserve native Codex orchestration while making frequent agent switching a single action.
Additional information
Related to #22321, which introduced the Agent View. This is a narrower follow-up about fast repeated navigation among already-visible live agent threads, not a request for a global cross-process registry.
Useful acceptance criteria:
- One configurable action switches from any thread to an assigned agent.
- Slot mappings remain stable while dashboard ordering and status groups change.
- The parent thread has a direct binding.
- Selecting a slot never duplicates the agent thread.
- Terminal-safe command fallback is available when numeric modifier keys are unavailable.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start with the /agents command center and the existing keyboard-action and command-dispatch entry points; trace how live agent threads, parent navigation, and status groups are identified. The work is done when configurable slots, direct switching, parent navigation, stable mappings, and a terminal-safe command fallback meet the listed acceptance criteria without duplicating threads.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- rust
- Domain
- cli
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Active
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 48/100