Troubleshooting

🚑 Troubleshooting

Start here; most of these have a one-line fix.

crower: command not found

The archive was extracted but its folder is not on PATH. Either move both binaries to a directory that is (/usr/local/bin), or run the bundled add_to_path.sh / add_to_path.bat from the folder you extracted them into, and open a new terminal.

A shortcut runs the wrong thing

A stored name that collides with a subcommand is not reachable as crower <name>. Use the explicit form:

crower execute list      # your command named "list", not the subcommand

error: … on stderr and exit code 1

That is the designed failure path: the work did not happen and the reason is the one line printed. Common causes: a path that does not exist, a name that conflicts, or a prompt declined under --no-input.

It hangs waiting for input

Something needs an answer. If you are in a script, pass --no-input so it fails fast instead of waiting; interactively, just answer the prompt.

revert did nothing

revert walks history backwards, one step per call:

crower list -i        # what is there, newest first
crower revert 1       # undo the most recent entry
crower revert 3       # or the last three

If history is empty, the operation never appended — check that you used the crower/cr binary and not a shell alias.

Restored the wrong thing

crower list -i                       # find the entry
crower restore <name>                # bring back a deleted command
crower revert 1                      # or undo the last operation

A command behaves differently on Windows

A command line is one line. cmd is line-oriented: a CR/LF inside a value starts a new command, and no quoting prevents it. %VAR% expands on the command line and cannot be quoted away either. Keep Exec single-line and use Env with ${VAR} for values that must not be expanded.

The GUI window does not open

crower-gui is the Fyne app included in every platform archive and needs a graphical session. In a terminal-only environment use crower gui, which renders in the terminal itself.

On Windows, run crower-gui.exe — the one with the crow icon. It is built as a graphical program, so a console window does not open and closing one cannot take the window with it. If a build without the icon or the graphical subsystem is in front of you, reinstall from the release archive: the release checks both.

The window does not open on Windows

crower-gui is a graphical program: it has no console, so a start that fails inside Fyne used to look like a double-click that does nothing. It now writes what happened to fyne.log beside crower.yaml (%USERPROFILE%\crower\fyne.log), and a window Fyne cannot create raises a dialog with the reason and leaves the file behind. Other Fyne messages — a locale it cannot round-trip, a clipboard it cannot reach — stay in the log: they are recoverable and do not deserve a modal box. A run that closes normally removes the file.

The most common reason is that the display driver has no OpenGL 2.1. Windows reports this as window creation error / WGL: The driver does not appear to support OpenGL. Remote Desktop sessions and machines using the basic display driver do this:

• connect to the machine locally, or over a console session rather than RDP;
• install the graphics driver for the GPU, or update it;
• meanwhile, crower gui opens the same tools in a terminal.

Windows says "This app can't run on your PC"

That dialog is the Windows loader rejecting the file, before crower runs a single line. For a release download the cause is the architecture: the release ships one archive per architecture, and an arm64 archive does not run on an Intel/AMD PC (or the reverse).

Check which machine the PC is — Settings → System → About → System type:

• "64-bit operating system, x64-based processor" → crower_<version>_windows_amd64.zip
• "64-bit operating system, ARM-based processor" → crower_<version>_windows_arm64.zip

Every Windows archive contains WINDOWS.txt, which names the architecture it was built for. A file that was damaged on the way down fails the same way: check the download against the release's checksums.txt before extracting.

certutil -hashfile crower_<version>_windows_amd64.zip SHA256

Still stuck

Open an issue with:

• crower --version
• your OS and architecture
• the exact command and the exact output
• whether it reproduces from a release build