Chronicle: allow selecting captured displays and add a global pause/resume shortcut #19341

What variant of Codex are you using?

Codex desktop app on macOS.

Current local environment where I observed this:

• Codex App: 26.422.21637 (2056)
• macOS: 26.4.1
• Chronicle enabled via chronicle = true

What feature would you like to see?

I would like Chronicle to provide two privacy/control improvements:

1. Allow users to choose which display(s) Chronicle captures, instead of always capturing every active display.
2. Add a configurable global keyboard shortcut to pause/resume Chronicle.

Problem / motivation

Chronicle is useful, but on a multi-monitor setup users often have only one screen dedicated to coding while other screens may contain private messages, phone mirroring, personal browser windows, dashboards, or other sensitive content.

On my current four-display setup, Chronicle creates capture artifacts for multiple displays (display-1, display-2, display-3, display-8). I only want my main work screen captured.

The current all-displays behavior makes it hard to leave Chronicle enabled continuously, even though the feature itself is valuable.

There also does not appear to be a Chronicle-specific keyboard shortcut. Today I can pause/enable it through the UI, but when switching to sensitive work I want an immediate pause/resume action without finding the icon or opening settings.

Proposed behavior

Add Chronicle controls such as:

• Capture all displays
• Capture selected display(s)
• Optionally exclude selected display(s)

The selected displays should be visible in Settings, ideally using display names or arrangement previews, and should persist across app restarts.

Add a configurable global shortcut for:

• Toggle Chronicle pause/resume

When paused:

• Chronicle should stop writing new frames
• Chronicle should stop OCR updates
• Chronicle should stop generating new summaries/memories from screen content
• The paused/running state should be clearly visible in the UI

Optional but useful:

• Add a separate “pause and clear current rolling buffer” action for moments when the user realizes sensitive content was visible.

Current behavior observed

• ~/.codex/config.toml appears to expose only a boolean chronicle = true.
• codex_chronicle --help exposes --storage-root, but no user-facing display selection option.
• Chronicle captures multiple active displays on a multi-monitor macOS setup.
• I could not find a Chronicle-specific hotkey setting, while Codex does expose shortcut settings for other features.

Related issues

I found nearby Chronicle issues, but they seem distinct from this request:

• Chronicle on macOS repeatedly re-triggers the "private window picker" screen/audio prompt after Allow #19134: recurring macOS private-window-picker / screen/audio prompt
• Codex Chronicle triggers high coreaudiod CPU with Rogue Amoeba ARK / SoundSource #19126: Chronicle triggering high coreaudiod CPU with audio tooling

This request is specifically about user privacy/control: selected-display capture and quick pause/resume.