[xmonad] xmobar crash analysis

[Gauthier Östervall]

Hi all!

I hope it's ok to ask xmobar questions here, it fills related enough.
Frankly, I don't know if my problem is caused by xmobar or xmonad.

Every now and then, maybe every other day, my xmobar crashes. It just
disappears, leaving a gap where I can see my background picture.

The only way to make it reappear is to log out and in. Restarting
xmobar from a terminal (same command as in my xmonad.hs) starts the
process, says that "Fields missing from config defaulted:
overrideRedirect,persistent", but the bar does not appear. Mod+q
doesn't help.

What I wonder is how I find crash and debug info about this.
/var/log/syslog doesn't mention anything about xmobar, xmonad.errors
is empty. What is going on?

Thanks,
Gauthier

[Brandon Allbery]

Post by Gauthier Östervall
What I wonder is how I find crash and debug info about this.
/var/log/syslog doesn't mention anything about xmobar, xmonad.errors
is empty. What is going on?

It's going to be in the session log, wherever that is: for `startx` it
defaults to the virtual console you ran it on (you can put a redirection
such as `exec >~/.xsession-errors 2>&1` near the top of ~/.xinitrc to
change it); for display managers it's usually ~/.xsession-errors. Some
systemd-based systems may instead use a systemd log accessed via journalctl.

xmonad.errors is *only* used when compiling an xmonad config, not for any
other purpose. Because of the specific way this file is used to collect
output from compiling an xmonad config, you should not try to use it for
anything else.