Continuation of breaking up this PR
https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/9116
## Summary
- Thread user text element ranges through TUI/TUI2 input, submission,
queueing, and history so placeholders survive resume/edit flows.
- Preserve local image attachments alongside text elements and rehydrate
placeholders when restoring drafts.
- Keep model-facing content shapes clean by attaching UI metadata only
to user input/events (no API content changes).
## Key Changes
- TUI/TUI2 composer now captures text element ranges, trims them with
text edits, and restores them when submission is suppressed.
- User history cells render styled spans for text elements and keep
local image paths for future rehydration.
- Initial chat widget bootstraps accept empty `initial_text_elements` to
keep initialization uniform.
- Protocol/core helpers updated to tolerate the new InputText field
shape without changing payloads sent to the API.
Add support for returning threads by either `created_at` OR `updated_at`
descending. Previously core always returned threads ordered by
`created_at`.
This PR:
- updates core to be able to list threads by `updated_at` OR
`created_at` descending based on what the caller wants
- also update `thread/list` in app-server to expose this (default to
`created_at` if not specified)
All existing codepaths (app-server, TUI) still default to `created_at`,
so no behavior change is expected with this PR.
**Implementation**
To sort by `updated_at` is a bit nontrivial (whereas `created_at` is
easy due to the way we structure the folders and filenames on disk,
which are all based on `created_at`).
The most naive way to do this without introducing a cache file or sqlite
DB (which we have to implement/maintain) is to scan files in reverse
`created_at` order on disk, and look at the file's mtime (last modified
timestamp according to the filesystem) until we reach `MAX_SCAN_FILES`
(currently set to 10,000). Then, we can return the most recent N
threads.
Based on some quick and dirty benchmarking on my machine with ~1000
rollout files, calling `thread/list` with limit 50, the `updated_at`
path is slower as expected due to all the I/O:
- updated-at: average 103.10 ms
- created-at: average 41.10 ms
Those absolute numbers aren't a big deal IMO, but we can certainly
optimize this in a followup if needed by introducing more state stored
on disk.
**Caveat**
There's also a limitation in that any files older than `MAX_SCAN_FILES`
will be excluded, which means if a user continues a REALLY old thread,
it's possible to not be included. In practice that should not be too big
of an issue.
If a user makes...
- 1000 rollouts/day → threads older than 10 days won't show up
- 100 rollouts/day → ~100 days
If this becomes a problem for some reason, even more motivation to
implement an updated_at cache.
