codex - 💡(How to fix) Fix Codex Desktop hangs after sidebar project menu move/unpin action on macOS

What version of the Codex App are you using?

Codex Desktop 26.513.31313

What subscription do you have?

ChatGPT account; subscription tier not included here.

What issue are you seeing?

Codex Desktop on macOS can become unresponsive after using a sidebar project action. In this repro, opening the three-dot menu next to the Personal Ops project in the sidebar while trying to move/unpin it caused the app to wedge.

This is not a normal crash or force-quit case:

• animations continue
• no new assistant text appears
• the UI stops responding
• normal quit succeeds
• after relaunch, the app responds again

I also submitted in-app feedback with feedback ID:

019de943-3504-7783-bbe9-fa301b4fa29f

What steps can reproduce the bug?

1. Launch Codex Desktop on macOS.
2. In the sidebar, locate the Personal Ops project.
3. Click the three-dot project menu.
4. Attempt to move/unpin the project from the sidebar.
5. Observe Codex stop responding while remaining alive.

I reproduced this across two incidents. The first capture was after the app had already become unresponsive, and the second capture covered the actual freeze window.

What is the expected behavior?

Project menu actions such as move/unpin should complete without wedging the renderer or main app process. If the action fails, Codex should surface an error and remain interactive.

What actually happened?

The app remained open and visually alive, but stopped responding to further interaction. The UI no longer produced new assistant text, and the only practical recovery was to quit and reopen Codex. Quitting worked normally; force quit was not required.

Diagnostic evidence

I captured Activity Monitor samples and spindumps while Codex was unresponsive.

The strongest signal came from the renderer spindump:

• Codex Helper (Renderer) / CrRendererMain was blocked for 1000/1000 samples.
• The block was a turnstile wait on the main Codex process.
• The main Codex process remained alive and mostly idle in the AppKit run loop, with worker/native activity.
• The backend codex process was alive and mostly waiting.

Around the incident, system logs also showed repeated Codex XPC service lookup failures.

Redaction / privacy note

Raw Instruments traces and raw spindumps include system-wide process and filesystem context, so I did not attach them publicly. I prepared redacted Codex-only text extracts and can provide them privately if maintainers need them.

The OpenAI Help Center upload widget rejected the redacted zip/log bundle as an unsupported file type, so the in-app feedback ID above is the main private diagnostic reference.

Related issues checked

I searched existing issues for sidebar, project menu, unpin/move, context menu, and macOS Desktop hang terms. The closest issues I found were adjacent but not exact duplicates:

• #19750: Desktop hangs when clicking a specific browser-sidebar thread.
• #11278: AppKit menu inconsistency and crash on project resume.
• #22487: Recent projects no longer move to the top.

This issue appears distinct because the repro is a sidebar project three-dot move/unpin action that wedges the app without a full crash.