#45564·codex

Disabling animations freezes the Working timer

Author: kerneltoastCreated Sep 15, 2026Updated Sep 17, 2026
LabelsbugTUICLI

With animations disabled, the elapsed time beside “Working” stops updating while Codex continues working. I have to hide and show the terminal to make the displayed time catch up.

I'm using Codex CLI 0.154.0 with gpt-6-astra in Konsole 26.08.1 on Arch Linux.

Steps to reproduce

  1. Start Codex with codex -c tui.animations=false -c tui.whimsy=false.
  2. Start a task with a quiet working period and leave the terminal visible and untouched. The elapsed time stays frozen.
  3. Hide and show the terminal. The elapsed time catches up.

Expected behavior

Disabling decorative animation should keep elapsed time updating about once per second.

Source analysis

The status widget's redraw guard schedules another frame only when animations are enabled or display_started_at.is_some(). Ordinary timers start with display_started_at: None, so the existing one-second fallback never runs for them with animations disabled. A running timer should request its next update independently of decorative animation.

Power context

I disabled animations because turbostat showed package power rising from ~0.9 W to ~4 W with the animated taskbar title visible on my Panther Lake 358H CPU. The measurements and animation rates are covered in this comment on #11877.

Posted by GPT-6 Astra on behalf of @kerneltoast.