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#1654 Cannot close taskcoach after opening a calendar view
Installed taskcoach from Ubuntu repositories on Linux Mint 18.3 with Xfce.
Aside from it everywhere cutting off various parts of GUI elements, it seems to have major issues with opening the calendar view. When I do, the calendar appears wedged in between the top tool bar and the other views and cannot be accessed. After I have opened it, taskcoach can still be used, but it can no longer be closed.
Traceback attached.
When you first add a calendar or other viewer, it starts as a floating window, not a real window. You need to drag it to the location where you want it to go (as a pane or tab in the main window). Once dragged and dropped, everything should be fine.
But in case that's not the issue, you can reset the UI by renaming or removing the .ini config file. That will lose your prefs but won't affect your task file(s). You can rename your existing one just in case.
https://answers.launchpad.net/taskcoach/+faq/1061 describes the file location, how to rename or delete.
Thanks for getting back to me so quickly, Aaron.
While renaming the ini file works, unfortunately, what I described here is a division by zero crash (see attached traceback). The calendar view window also didn't float, but it was stuck somewhere in GUI nirvana, see screenshot.
I never made any changes to its location, because this already happened when I first opened the calendar view, and I cannot move it. The buttons in its top bar work, but I cannot close the other views to see what's below.
Using meld for comparing and stepping through my changes to the ini file, I was able to trace it to the setting for 'efforthourend.'
It seems it's not possible to set the end of the working day to something after midnight without crashing the program.
I think there should either be a check that prevents setting the workday end time to a number smaller than workday start time, or, preferably, it should allow to set your working hours freely, and allow for crossing the midnight mark.
[view]
snoozetimes = [5, 10, 15, 30, 60, 120, 1440]
efforthourend = 3
descriptionpopups = True
Last edit: mhachmann 2018-01-15
(deleting the .ini file loses all settings one has made, btw., so maybe it's worth to mention this to less careful or knowledgeable users)
I set it will "lose your prefs" yes.
Anyway, I still suspect it's a floating window. Try clicking and dragging the minuature title-bar of the Calendar. When you do, you'll see these other little icon symbols on the center of the screen and elsewhere, and you can drag over those and it will highlight places you could drop the viewer. I'm 99% sure this is what's going on. It's floating and you haven't learned how to drop it to a set place. I know the UI is unintuitive in some ways, it's a strange aspect of the framework Task Coach is built on. But that's what's happening.. You just need to drop it in place.
Please at least read the traceback, Aaron, before you accuse me of being dumb.
The window is not floating, and I cannot grab anything (with the broken preferences file).
The reason is a different one. It's definitely related to the error in the program that I described. I tested it by changing the .ini file step by step until it worked. I'm not a dumb, unknowing user, but writing and reading software myself on a daily basis.
It would be easy enough to fix by adding a check.
I didn't even say anything that's POSSIBLE to misinterpret as accusing you of being dumb.
The window is floating in the weird WXWidgets style. It looks like how it looks on my system when I start a viewer. It needs to be dragged into place. Attempting to close Task Coach without doing that will cause problems. I'm quite sure this is what's going on.
I don't know if there's also some additional glitch happening. I'm not a programmer myself, I'm on the team doing all the other support stuff. I'm not suggesting that I know the floating issue is the source of the traceback. But I do see from your screenshot that you have a floating viewer, (which is NOT recognized by any system window manager as a window, to be clear). Please try to place the viewer so that we can isolate any other remaining problems.
Last edit: Aaron Wolf 2018-01-15
It is impossible to move. Of course I tried that first.
If there weren't any sensitive data, I'd have made a screen cast. I know you are giving support as best as you can, but here you're going down the wrong lane.
Anyway, changing the number 3 behind 'efforthourend' to 18 fixes the problem. Else taskcoach doesn't even start...
You could try that out yourself quickly - just open your ini file, set that number to something smaller than 'efforthourstart' and try to open the calendar.
There is an option to anonymize task data, for reference. But you have to get everything working for you to then use that with the case in question. You might otherwise just start with a fresh file.
Even regardless of your other issue (which I don't have time to investigate today but will leave the issue open), you should not leave viewers floating. Task Coach does not work well that way, it can't save the settings correctly and that might be a cause of .ini problems.
Here's how floating viewers work:
If you have not experienced that, then please be aware that viewers need to be set in place this way. This is not a denial of any other issues you may be having. This is confusing, and it's not you being dumb.
Note that my color scheme on my system makes things look different, as I have a dark theme.
Perhaps you had everything all set and just moved the viewers together to hide your tasks (although you could just start a new task file to hide any personal info, Task Coach can load multiple task files). But bear with me, I'm verifying about an issue that is one of the known most-confusing elements of Task Coach.
Last edit: Aaron Wolf 2018-01-15
Aaron, I wish the interface only looked half as slick for me as it does for you.
Mine looks very broken, with texts cut off, day widths not adapting, no scroll options in many places, and the translations are... hmm... not good... in places. But that's not the topic of this report.
I do know how to snap the 'floating windows' into place. I found that out rather quickly, and even on my own (surprise !), and I'm telling you now for the fourth(?) time that that is no way related to this report, either.
What this is about is a problem with drawing the current work day in the calendar panel, and a deeper problem of missing a check when entering preferences data.
I'm leaving you to your floating windows pet peeve now, I've got better things to do than try to present solutions for bugs on a silver platter, and then trying to fend off unrelated suggestions for longer than it would have taken someone to fix this.
Thanks for confirming. Unfortunately, there's been very little bandwidth for Task Coach development for sometime.
I'll assign this to Jerome and hope he can look at the issue.
If you are a Python dev and interested in helping at all, you're very welcome.
For reference, my system is KDE Neon (Ubuntu 16.04) and the gif was Task Coach with a clean .ini. Sounds like there may be something strange about your DE and its interactions with Task Coach. The goal, as I understand it, is to eventually move Task Coach to newer framework libraries which is probably related to the issues, but I don't know.
Thanks. Yes, I just saw that Jérome wasn't happy with wxpython. I've only had the pleasure of trying to compile it, after pulling from pip, and it was a real pain because of all the dependencies. I'm not a Python UI programmer, so I'll pass on the offer.
Hi, over 7 years later (from this issue ticket), I'm excited to tell you that https://github.com/taskcoach/taskcoach now has updated Python3 Task Coach codebase! Packages are available for some common Linux systems and we can add more.
If this issue still arises, we can probably fix it now that development is happening again. We'd love to have you test the updated program
Cheers