Codex App Gets Full Theme Customization: Colors, Fonts, and Shareable Presets

OpenAI shipped Codex App 26.312 today with a full theming system. You can now change base themes, adjust accent, background, and foreground colors independently, swap out UI and code fonts, and share your custom themes with other people.

This has been one of the most requested features since the Codex app launched. GitHub issues #1618 and #11073 tracked the demand, with users asking for everything from Catppuccin and Dracula presets to full semantic color token support. The update addresses the core ask: make the app look the way you want.

What You Can Customize

The new Appearance section in Settings gives you control over five things:

Setting	What it does
Base theme	Choose a starting theme as your foundation
Accent color	Adjust the primary highlight color used across the UI
Background color	Set the main background color
Foreground color	Control text and content colors
Fonts	Pick separate fonts for the UI and code editor

Font choices apply everywhere in the app, including the diff review panel and the integrated terminal. If you’ve been fighting with monospace rendering in the diff viewer, you can now set a code font you actually like and have it carry through consistently.

Sharing Themes

The sharing feature lets you export your custom theme configuration and pass it to someone else. OpenAI describes it simply: “share your custom theme with friends.” The specifics of the sharing format (whether it’s a config file, a link, or something else) aren’t fully documented yet, but the functionality is live.

This is the kind of feature that tends to spawn community repositories. The Codex CLI side already had people requesting presets for popular color schemes like Nord, Solarized, One Dark, Tokyo Night, and Gruvbox. Now that the app has a proper theming layer, expect those to show up quickly.

The TUI Got Themes Too

The terminal-based CLI already received theme improvements two weeks earlier in version 0.105.0 (February 26). That update added:

• A /theme picker with live preview
• Syntax-highlighted fenced code blocks and diffs in the TUI
• Theme-aware diff colors that work properly across light and dark terminals
• Better rendering in Windows Terminal and other low-color environments

So the theming story now covers both surfaces: the desktop app (26.312) and the CLI (0.105.0+). If you work across both, your visual experience should be considerably less jarring than it was a month ago.

What Else Shipped in 26.312

The themes feature didn’t come alone. The same release includes a reworked automations system:

• Local or worktree execution: Automations can now run directly in your project or in an isolated worktree
• Custom reasoning levels: Choose how much thinking your automation tasks should use
• Model selection: Pick which model runs your automations
• Automation templates: Browse and discover pre-built automation templates

Combined with the plugin system introduced in 0.110.0 (March 5) and the skills marketplace, the Codex app is becoming more of a configurable development environment than a chat window that writes code.

Why This Matters

Theme customization is one of those features that sounds trivial until you spend 8 hours a day in a tool. Developers have strong opinions about their visual environment (the VS Code theme marketplace has thousands of entries for a reason). The Codex app was previously locked into its default appearance, which pushed some users toward the CLI specifically because it inherited their terminal’s color scheme.

Now both surfaces support customization, and the sharing mechanism opens the door for community themes. It’s not a technical breakthrough, but it’s the kind of quality-of-life improvement that makes the difference between a tool people try and a tool people stick with.

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Sources: Codex Changelog, Codex App Settings, Releasebot: Codex March 2026, GitHub Issue #1618: Control over color theme in TUI, GitHub Issue #11073: Custom colorscheme request