When something goes wrong

A ticket someone edited while you had it open

LongClaw notices the file changed underneath you and says “Changed on disk” rather than overwriting it. It never silently discards either version — you are shown the conflict and choose.

A ticket that will not parse

A malformed ticket.md stays visible as a degraded ticket, in the column it was already in, instead of vanishing from the board. Opening it shows the file itself, line-numbered with the offending line marked, and the error names the line it happened on.

Open in editor hands the file to whatever you open Markdown with; fix it there and it returns on its own, or press Retry parse rather than waiting.

LongClaw will not “repair” it for you, because a repair is a guess about what you meant.

A ticket from a newer version of LongClaw

Shown read-only — “Newer format, shown read-only” — rather than migrated. Upgrade the app to edit it.

A project folder that moved

The project is marked unreachable rather than forgotten, and you can point LongClaw at its new location. Nothing is deleted; it stopped being able to find your folder, not your work.

The project list itself is corrupt

LongClaw fails closed: it will not reset the file or silently forget your projects. Quit the app, and in ~/Library/Application Support/io.longclaw.desktop/ copy project-registry.backup.json over project-registry.json, then restart.

If the backup is unusable too, just open your project folders again — this list is not your data. Your tickets are in your project, untouched.

The window comes back on the wrong appearance or the wrong project

Those choices live in device-preferences.json, in the same folder as the project list. Unlike the list, it fails open: one LongClaw cannot read is renamed to device-preferences.invalid.json and the app starts on its defaults rather than refusing to start.

Deleting it is a supported way to start over — it holds no ticket, and nothing in it is your data.

Anything else

LongClaw says what it was doing, which file it was doing it to, and what to try. If you want more than the window shows, launch it from a terminal:

LONGCLAW_LOCAL_DIAGNOSTIC=1 \
  /Applications/LongClaw.app/Contents/MacOS/longclaw-desktop

It prints lines prefixed with LONGCLAW_LOCAL_DIAGNOSTIC to stdout and sends them nowhere — they go to your terminal and stop there. Expect a small channel rather than a log: how long the first board took to appear, and a line if the watcher ever loses filesystem events and rebuilds the index.

If you are reporting a problem, this is the output worth pasting.