Logging & troubleshooting

When something does not work as expected, the log file is the first place to look.

Open the log

The quickest way is from the app: About Cogno → Open log.

The file lives here:

Platform	Path
macOS	`~/Library/Logs/rocks.cogno/cogno.log`
Windows	`%LOCALAPPDATA%\rocks.cogno\logs\cogno.log`
Linux	`~/.local/share/rocks.cogno/logs/cogno.log`

Get more detail

The default log level is info. Set the COGNO_LOG_LEVEL environment variable before starting Cogno to change it. Valid values are error, warn, info, debug and trace.

# For one launch only
COGNO_LOG_LEVEL=debug cogno

# Permanently: add to ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc
export COGNO_LOG_LEVEL=debug

Check your config

Cogno shows a warning for settings it does not know and an error for invalid values. If a setting still seems to have no effect, these commands show what Cogno actually reads:

cogno config path            # which file is in use
cogno config show            # the contents of that file
cogno config get font.size   # the effective value of one setting

See the CLI page for all commands.

Start without restoring the last session

If something goes wrong while Cogno brings back your last session, start it once without restoring. Nothing is deleted:

cogno --set terminal.restore.enabled=false

Then run Delete Restore Data from the command palette to remove the saved session for good. See Workspaces.

Umlauts, accents or emoji are broken

Typical signs: a pasted ü shows up as �, or text copied in the terminal arrives in other programs as gr√ºn instead of grün.

The cause is the locale of the shell, not the clipboard. If the shell does not run in a UTF-8 locale, it splits such characters into single bytes, and tools like pbcopy read them in the wrong encoding. Check it in a Cogno terminal:

echo $LANG        # should end in .UTF-8, for example en_US.UTF-8
locale charmap    # should print UTF-8

locale charmap is the one to trust. A LANG that names a locale your system does not have — on macOS for example en_DE.UTF-8, the combination of English with the region Germany — looks right but silently falls back to plain ASCII.

Cogno sets LANG for the shell when the app itself was started without one, as it is when launched from the Dock or Finder. If the value is still wrong, check whether your shell startup files (.zshrc, .zprofile, .bashrc) set LANG or LC_ALL, or set it for the profile in your config:

shell.profiles.zsh.env.LANG = en_US.UTF-8

Open a new terminal afterwards.

Report a problem

Open an issue on GitHub or ask in the Cogno Discord. Include your operating system, your shell, and the relevant part of the log file.