justin․searls․co

You won't believe this Codex fork

Reddit turned me onto this just-every/code fork of OpenAI's Codex CLI last night. Since it uses the binary name coder to differentiate it from code and codex, I guess we should just call this thing Coder.

In addition to everything you get with Codex:

  • A built-in diff viewer (Ctrl+D). If you're like me, you often have Claude Code or Codex open in one window and your preferred Git UI (I use Fork) in a second window, so having it integrated is wonderful. Moreover, while viewing a diff, you can press e to request an explanation of the specific change you're looking at
  • Built-in browser support with ASCII previews (Ctrl+B) Like Playwright, it automates browsers over the very fast CDP, and it takes zero futzing to get started with it (unlike tacking an MCP tool onto Claude)
  • Multi-agent consensus If you're a real sicko, you can hand the same question or task to all three of GPT, Claude, and Gemini and keep the consensus winner among them

Coder also has a themeable, more stable curses-like UI (as opposed to top-level terminal scrollback). It's the rare case of a community taking a heavily-funded corporate open source project and adding a lot of visual flair and spit polish to it. But I'll be damned if this isn't a much nicer experience than either Claude Code or Codex out of the box. (I can't speak to OpenCode, but since it doesn't support ChatGPT subscriptions, I'm not interested in it.)

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