Preserving a Prompt Without Sending It Using the Codex CLI

I often use voice-to-text to prompt in the Codex CLI, one of my preferred agents these days. Sometimes, after the transcribed text lands in the prompt field, I realize I need to do something else before I send it. With Claude Code, I’d gotten into the habit of using Ctrl + S to clear the input field and stash the prompt. After I send the next prompt, Claude Code restores the stashed text to the input field. I hadn’t found anything similar in Codex, so I’d been selecting and copying the text with my mouse. Then it started snowing, and the copied text started including both unwanted line breaks and random dots. It was a mess.

So, I finally made the effort to figure out how to make this work. The first solution I found worked, but was far more cumbersome than I thought was reasonable. Pressing Ctrl + G opens the current prompt in an external editor, which was vim in my terminal. From there, you can run :%w !pbcopy to copy the text to the macOS clipboard, then exit vim. It works, but isn’t easy. It also didn’t work out of the box in my VS Code setup (yes, I sometimes still use an IDE). The fix was to launch Codex with:

VISUAL="code --wait" EDITOR="code --wait" codex

Then Ctrl + G opens a Markdown file containing the current prompt in VS Code, where I can copy the text normally.

The answer I was looking for turned out to be pressing Ctrl + C while the unsent prompt is still in the input field. This clears the input while keeping the text in the prompt history. From there, I can do whatever I need, then press ↑ to navigate through Codex’s prompt history and retrieve the text I’d set aside.