Bike thinks it's not the active application when it is

Bike Outliner
1

Hi all,

I noticed a weird bug recently where the text cursor disappears, text selections are gray, and keyboard shortcuts no longer work.

I’ve had trouble reproducing it, but at the moment I have a somewhat reliable reproduction:

  • Put several lines of text in a Bike document
  • Select a range of text that’s not the last line
  • Activate a different app
  • Right-click in the inactive Bike window, ideally somewhere in the empty space below the cursor
  • Left-click in the Bike window to dismiss the right-click menu. Bike is still not the active app.
  • Left-click again in the window, and Bike becomes the active app. The text cursor should now be gone, all text selections are gray, and keyboard shortcuts don’t work.

At the moment, activating a different app and then Bike again will restore normal behavior, but the other day, the only way for me to work around this was to quit and relaunch Bike. It also took me a number of tries to get the bug to surface today, but after it started happening, it’s been reproducible.

I’m experiencing this on two separate ARM Macs — M1 Max Mac Studio and M2 Pro MBP — and on the latest macOS 14.4.1 and Bike 1.18.1.

My wild guess is there is some situation where Bike mistakenly believes it is not the active app when in reality it is. Anyway, wanted to pass this along!

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2

Thanks for great set of instructions the enable me to reproduce the problem. Reproduced it on my first try. I’ll try to get a fix in the next day or two.

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3

This is proving tricky to fix. I’m noticing that this problem is reproducible in many macOS apps. For example both TextEdit and Xcode have similar behavior. At issue is the underlying mechanism for determining if an app is active or not seems broken in this case. App gets into a state where part of the UI seems to say it’s active, while at the same time the application state that my code can read reports that the app is not active.

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4

I’m glad you’ve been able to reproduce it, though sorry to hear it’s looking like an OS bug. I wonder if this was a regression in 14.4 — that roughly coincides with when I started noticing it.

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The latest Bike preview release hacks around this problem. It’s a bit ugly, but I think working. It should be that when you show the context menu in the above described situation Bike will immediately become active.

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