Codex CLI 0.166.0 adds keyboard transcript selection

OpenAI tagged Codex CLI 0.166.0 on October 29, 2026, two days after 0.165.0. It is a TUI and reliability release: you can now select and search the transcript from the keyboard, and resuming or forking a thread no longer loses approval settings or reasoning-token counts. The same build reached npm as @openai/codex@0.166.0 the same evening (UTC), under the latest tag.

Release facts

What's new

• Keyboard transcript selection. Word, line and page motions, built-in search and configurable shortcuts for picking text out of the transcript (PRs 57221 to 57224).
• codex doctor --network-only runs only the configuration, connectivity and WebSocket checks, which is the part you need when a proxy or firewall is the suspect (PR 57606).
• codex queue --resume resumes unloaded threads after you queue a message to them (PR 57232).
• Safety blocks explain themselves. The TUI now says why a request was blocked and offers safer follow-up prompts you can select (PRs 57363 and 57365).
• GPT-6.1 Terra is in the bundled, Vertex AI and Amazon Bedrock model catalogs (PR 57293). 0.165.0 had already added it to the default catalogs and added a built-in Vertex AI provider, set with model_provider = "gcp".
• Markdown renders the same way in async questions, choices, answers and transcript replies.

What's fixed

• Resume and fork keep your settings. Approval and permission choices you had acknowledged survive a resume or fork (PR 57227), and reasoning-token accounting carries over, so a resumed thread no longer compacts early (PR 57839).
• Unarchiving a parent thread restores the descendant threads it spawned.
• Killed composer text comes back with its local image attachments.
• Reconnects: the TUI recovers more cleanly, and /quit and /exit work while offline.
• macOS standalone installs clean up correctly when files are in use or paths contain non-ASCII characters.
• App-server startup and shutdown races are fixed, and finished runtimes are released promptly.

Questions

Is anything breaking? The release notes list no breaking change. Under the hood, development and release builds move to Node.js 24.22.1 and Rust 1.95.0, and the standalone executor now ships inside the CLI and app-server packages. That matters only if you build Codex from source.

Should I take 0.166.0 or wait? Take it if you resume or fork threads often, since the two resume fixes address settings and context loss. The 0.166.0-alpha builds published on npm between October 27 and 29 were previews of this release; skip them now that the stable build is out.

Where does it fit next to other terminal agents? See Claude Code vs Codex for the closest comparison, and the coding agents category for OpenCode and Gemini CLI.