Preferences are being reported as default, even though they are being used

[habibalamin]

Hi,

 

My location, hotkey, theme, options, feature keywords, etc. are all showing as default in the preferences window, but they all work as expected. I select the dark theme, which works, but the next time I open the preferences window, it reports that the light theme is selected (even though the dark theme is being used). It reports that the icon is showing in the menu bar, even though it's not, and so on and so on, for all my preferences. My workflows and license remain.

 

Here are two emails I posted to Omnigroup's OS X talk mailing list looking for help. It may be related and thus may be useful for you.

 

The circumstances I'm about to describe are very strange, so I don't expect an answer, but I thought I might shoot off an email, just in case.

 

My machine is a 13" mid-2013 MacBook Air. The lid was closed when I found it in the state I will describe. I am the only one who uses it.

When I opened the lid, I was greeted with the Mavericks login screen. When I had closed the lid prior, I was logged in. That's the first weird thing I noticed.

 

The second thing I noticed was that I had to open Alfred manually when I logged in. That should have been automatic.

 

The next thing I noticed was that TotalTerminal had been launched (I have it set to launch on login, but when working on a bigger project, as I had been, I usually quit it so I can Alt-Tab, rather than going through the sliding out animation every time).

 

When I quit TotalTerminal and opened a new Terminal window, I also noticed that tmux ls showed the session I was working on. I attached to it and everything was still there.

 

The last thing is that Postgresql was no longer running. I'm using the one from Homebrew, with a launchd script that should have started it automatically on login. When I tried to relaunch it, I get this message:

 

LOG:  skipping missing configuration file "/usr/local/var/postgres/postgresql.auto.conf"

FATAL:  database files are incompatible with server

DETAIL:  The data directory was initialized by PostgreSQL version 9.3, which is not compatible with this version 9.4.0.

 

 

What the hell is going on?

 

 

 

More details.

 

Many apps are asking for my permission to allow network access again (I have the OS X firewall turned on).

 

I had to set all my Alfred settings again, but my packages were still there and so was my license. I changed the hotkey back to my preference, cmd + space, as well as my location. I had set them back how I like them earlier when I had composed the first email. Just now, I had to set them up again.

 

As I'm composing this email, I've had to remove the icon from the menu bar twice now.

[Andrew]

Hi,

 

My location, hotkey, theme, options, feature keywords, etc. are all showing as default in the preferences window, but they all work as expected. I select the dark theme, which works, but the next time I open the preferences window, it reports that the light theme is selected (even though the dark theme is being used). It reports that the icon is showing in the menu bar, even though it's not, and so on and so on, for all my preferences. My workflows and license remain.

 

Here are two emails I posted to Omnigroup's OS X talk mailing list looking for help. It may be related and thus may be useful for you.

 

I'm not quite sure where to start on this one... could you try creating a new user account, switching to that user and see if you see any issues there?

[habibalamin]

I reckon this was WindowServer crashing while I was away from my laptop; WindowServer definitely crashed a few times with that laptop back in 2015 while I wasn't away from it due to extreme RAM usage / not enough RAM.

 

PostgreSQL issues were probably due to a Homebrew upgrade that was only noticed after I had to relaunch it. tmux kept the sessions because it wasn't a full restart, and that's kinda one of the features of tmux (so sessions remain after exiting an SSH session). Different things being open or not probably depended on what exactly triggered their opening. Apps asking for network access again may be due to new binaries (why? or why only after log out/crash?).

 

The only one I can't explain is the various Alfred misbehaviours: having to set my settings up again, showing default settings despite settings change working, having to remove it from the menu bar multiple times.

 

I don't recall if I ever created a new user, as I had no idea how I would have gone about trying to reproduce the conditions anyway. I doubt it would have occurred with a new user. I don't remember it happening again in the way it happened in this instance.

 

Anyway, that old laptop definitely did all sorts of funky stuff when I used to pushed the RAM usage on it (which I tend to do). Interestingly, when I upgraded to a 2020 Intel MacBook Air back in 2020, those problems were reduced quite a lot. Now, I'm on an M1 Pro (for a couple years now) and, even when I push the RAM usage such that I'm using twice the RAM I have available (via swap space, I guess), I get no ill effects except a very minor slow-down during short moments of large amounts of swapping in one go. It's unnoticeable. So I guess this won't be a problem for me for the foreseeable future.

Edited July 7, 2023 by habibalamin