openai / openai/codex

Allow rebinding existing app shortcuts (e.g. Toggle sidebar) and expose Quit (Ctrl+Q) in Keyboard Shortcuts

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app enhancement windows-os
Dominant language
Rust
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Forks
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Description

What variant of Codex are you using?

App (Windows desktop, 26.901.5280.0)

What feature would you like to see?

Context: I keep "toggle sidebar" on Ctrl+Q in every VS Code–based editor I use, because Ctrl+B is a full-hand stretch for something I press dozens of times a day. The Codex App is the only place I can't make that change.

The Keyboard Shortcuts page (Ctrl+/) already handles the easy half — assigning keys to unassigned actions like "Search chats" works fine. What's missing:

  1. Rebinding actions that ship with a default. "Toggle sidebar" is locked to Ctrl+B.
  2. Quit isn't in the picture at all. Ctrl+Q exits the app, but searching the shortcuts list for "quit" returns nothing — the binding lives below the visible layer, so it can't be reassigned, disabled, or conflict-checked against anything a user sets. Confirmed on 26.901.5280.0: pressing Ctrl+Q closes the app immediately, list entry or not.

These two keys collide by design, so fixing either alone doesn't unlock the use case: rebind the sidebar to Ctrl+Q and the shell may still quit first — there's no defined precedence today. Treating them together — rebindable defaults plus configurable (or disablable) native bindings — is what actually unblocks it.

Additional information
  • Related: #27834 (native-menu commands honor only the first configured keybinding), #27835 ("Add another shortcut" discoverability).
  • Windows 11 x64 here, daily-driving the App — glad to test any build that moves on this. The moment rebinding ships, my whole keymap migrates the same day. Ctrl+Q as a quit shortcut, meanwhile, is doing its one job a little too well.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start from the Keyboard Shortcuts page opened with Ctrl+/ and trace how default bindings are represented and how native Ctrl+Q handling bypasses the visible list. Define the precedence between configurable shortcuts and native commands, then verify that Toggle sidebar and Quit can be rebound, disabled, and conflict-checked without the app exiting unexpectedly.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
desktop
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Active
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
48/100

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