Recover a stuck Mac Capture panel¶

This guide recovers the capture panel when a draft should still be on screen, Add block ID fails or will not take typing, paste is slow, Restart fails, or the menu-bar icon is missing. Capture failures keep the complete draft and destination on screen.

Before you start¶

Install Bob Mac Capture. Open the panel from the menu-bar item. A missing bob is Fix Mac Capture when bob is not resolved.

1. Confirm the draft is still there¶

A failed capture always preserves the complete draft and keeps the panel open. Use Copy Diagnostic next to the error for the exact bob message (the trailing draft argument is redacted). A panel that vanished after Return means the capture landed; the success notification names the route.

Closing the panel with Escape retains a nonempty draft and reopens it as left. Discard permanently clears it without stashing. Control-C always clears the draft: it stashes a semantically nonempty draft first, except a Task Go-To (/) draft is deliberately discarded and nothing is retained when stashing is off (capacity 0). Only a stashed draft can be recovered; restore it from the footer Stash action (Control-S) onto an empty editor. See Settings › Canceled Draft Stash. Shift-D Delete All in the stash picker permanently clears every retained draft, including the on-disk file; lowercase d does nothing.

2. Add block ID errors and focus¶

Duplicate IDs, stale task refs, terminal tasks, and file I/O errors are Bob errors. The Add block ID card keeps the selected task and typed ID visible so you can edit, retry, or press Escape to return to the refreshed task list. The draft is not expanded until Bob confirms the write.

If typing does not reach the Add block ID field, this is observation only:

log show --signpost --predicate 'subsystem == "org.bobs.bob-mac-capture"'

Look for block-id-focus-claimed (normal), block-id-focus-repaired (the safety net fired), or block-id-focus-claim-failed (report it).

3. Slow paste¶

With the source content still on the clipboard, compare rich flavors with plain text, then rewrite the clipboard as plain text and paste again:

osascript -e 'clipboard info'
pbpaste | pbcopy

clipboard info is read-only. pbpaste | pbcopy replaces the clipboard with plain text only. If that second paste is instant, the delay was rich flavor import.

4. Restart failed¶

Restart Bob Mac Capture refuses to quit rather than leaving no menu-bar item behind. It reports Restart failed when the process is running unbundled (swift run BobMacCapture or a raw .build binary) or the installed bundle at the launch-time path is missing. Both cases post a Restart failed notification and record the reason in Settings › Diagnostics. Install with just bundle then just install and try again.

No crash dialog, hotkey does nothing, Settings will not open: the app has no nib, so a broken entry point can launch an empty AppKit event loop. Check for a live silent process before assuming it failed to launch:

pgrep -fl BobMacCapture
log show --last 5m --predicate 'process == "BobMacCapture"'

Look for the launch-complete signpost (subsystem org.bobs.bob-mac-capture). Its absence means applicationDidFinishLaunching never ran. If the process is not running, check ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/ for a crash report.

If it goes wrong¶

If Restart still fails after just install, Diagnostics names a missing bundle path: install into that same target. If the icon is missing and pgrep shows a live process with no launch-complete, quit that process from Activity Monitor and open the installed Bob Mac Capture.app again. A swift test failure with no such module 'XCTest' is toolchain selection; see Build.