Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting

Start with Help > Diagnostics. It prints the version, the renderer in use, and every directory as resolved on your machine -- which is what most of the questions below turn out to be about.

Windows warns me before it will run this

SmartScreen, because the archives are unsigned (ADR-0055). More info then Run anyway.

Verify the download first if you would rather:

(Get-FileHash -Algorithm SHA256 .\bachelorpad-lite-1.0.0-windows-x86_64-setup.exe).Hash

against the line in SHA256SUMS.txt on the releases page.

It will not start at all

A leftover recovery journal is the usual cause, and it does not look like one: the recovery prompt is its own top-level window, and the main window never appears behind it, so the program looks hung rather than waiting.

Look in %LOCALAPPDATA%\bachelorpad\state\recovery\ (Linux: ~/.local/state/bachelorpad/recovery/). The files are small JSON documents that name the document they belong to.

Read them before deleting any. It is somebody's unsaved work, however little of it. An Untitled buffer's journal names no path at all, which is why you cannot filter these safely -- open them.

If it is not that, run from a terminal with logging on:

bpad --log debug

The window has no icon, or a file type shows a blank page in Explorer

The icons ship beside the executable, not inside it (ADR-0068). If you moved bachelorpad.exe out of the unpacked folder and left bachelorpad.ico and io.github.dboles99.bachelorpluslite.png behind, both break.

Move the whole folder, or unpack it again.

Text looks wrong, or the window renders oddly

Try the other renderer:

bpad --renderer platform
bpad --renderer software

Software is the default and is the one that behaves the same everywhere.

--help prints nothing when I double-click it

Expected on Windows. A release build is a GUI-subsystem executable with no console of its own, so stdout goes nowhere unless a terminal is attached. Run it from PowerShell or a command prompt.

Duplicate line and Alt+Up do nothing

They need the custom editor surface:

bpad --editor-view

The default surface is the toolkit's text widget, which will not say where the caret is -- and a feature that has to know cannot be built on it (ADR-0018). See Editing.

Typing is slow in a large file

The default editing view lays out the whole document again on every key, so typing slows as the file grows: measured at about 80 ms of processor per key at 100 KB, and more above that. From 512 KiB the status bar says so when the file opens (ADR-0092).

Reading, scrolling, Find and saving are not affected. To type in a large file, start the program with --editor-view, which draws only the lines on screen. It is not the default because it cannot take input-method text, so Japanese or Chinese cannot be typed in it.

Dropping a file on the window does nothing

Not implemented yet. It is buildable on Windows and on an X11 Linux session, and will not work on a native Wayland one, whose window system does not hand this toolkit a dropped file (ADR-0081). Until then, use File > Open, Open Recent, or name the file on the command line.

A file opens as gibberish

If it is a .bpadx, that is expected -- it is encrypted, and this build has no decryption in it (ADR-0064). It opens as ciphertext because that is literally what is in the file.

Otherwise the file is probably not UTF-8. This product reads and writes UTF-8 and UTF-8 with BOM, and nothing else; see Encoding for why.

Related Notes is empty, or Research Report says there is nothing

Your privacy profile is probably set to record nothing, which is a valid choice and not a fault. The rows say so in their own labels rather than appearing broken. See Privacy.

Reporting a problem

Open an issue with the output of Help > Diagnostics, what you did, and what happened instead.

For a security vulnerability, do not open a public issue -- see SECURITY.md.

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