codex - 💡(How to fix) Fix TUI: allow distinct styling/colors for user and assistant messages [1 comments, 2 participants]

What variant of Codex are you using?

Windows 11 - PowerShell 7.6.0 - Codex CLI in terminal mode

What feature would you like to see?

In Codex CLI, user prompts and assistant responses are currently rendered with very little visual distinction in the main conversation flow.

At the moment, this makes long sessions harder to scan, especially when looking back through a discussion to find a previous user instruction.

Additional information

Current behavior

• User and assistant messages appear with nearly the same color/styling
• The only distinction is a very small prefix marker
• Theme settings seem to affect diff blocks, but not the main user/assistant message styling
• Changing the terminal color scheme does not solve the issue if Codex renders both roles similarly

Expected behavior

It would be helpful to have stronger visual separation between:

• user messages
• assistant messages

Possible solutions

Any of the following would help:

• distinct colors for user vs assistant messages
• configurable role-based styling in the TUI theme
• stronger prefixes or labels for each role
• optional background contrast or border styling per role

Why this matters

In long conversations, readability and navigation degrade quickly when both sides of the conversation look almost identical. Better role separation would make the TUI much easier to use for iterative work.