Visual bug in SoarJavaDebugger on macOS

[dtemmerman]

I am the TA for a class where we are using Soar. Two of our students (both on macOS) are having a visual bug when opening SoarJavaDebugger, see the screengrabs below: the whole right hand side is not appearing correctly. In both cases the input fields are interacting with the cursor, so they are there, just not appearing. Any idea how to fix this?

Thanks in advance

[scijones]

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I haven't personally seen this, but I'll look into it.

[scijones]

@dtemmerman

I need to ask the usual questions here: could you tell me the systems that these folks are running on? Are they new M(1-4) silicon macs? Are they older? Are they updated? (Which Java version?) (The main thing I'm noticing when I look at our code is that we have different ".jar" files for the debugger, depending on which mac hardware. It would help debugging this if it turned out these two machines were unique in your class for having some particular hardware.)

Also, which version of Soar are you running? Is if the latest release? (9.6.4?)

Thanks for any help you can provide.

[foxtrotdelta-hub]

hi!
one of the students here.
I have an M2 MacBook Air running Tahoe 26.0.1, java 25 and running soar 9.6.4.
is there anything else you need ?
thanks in advance

[scijones]

Okay, this is a bit of a shot in the dark because I'm not actually sure what is wrong. I tried telling the debugger to refresh some panes, basically, just to see if it helps.

I'd like you to do the following:

• Where you have Soar, you should have a "soar-debugger.jar" file in a directory like "\bin\java".

• Would you rename that jar to something like "soar-debugger_old.jar" (so that you still have it).

• Then, I'd like you to download this jar file: https://github.com/SoarGroup/Soar/releases/download/releases%2F9.6.4-attempted-bugfix/soar-debugger.jar

• and, then put that downloaded jar file where the old one was.

I'd have to try to get more info to really do more than this. Are there other mac users in the class without issues? I'd like to know if you see any particular pattern.

[scijones]

And, while I know it's not exactly user friendly, there's always building soar (and thus also the debugger) from source on your machine to see if that's any different. I'm sorry if this isn't much help.

[vsi7-m]

hello, I'm the other student with the same issue and I have the same specs as the other student.
I tried your recommended fix but now I can't open the debugger at all.

[scijones]

Well, then please roll it back! Sorry! (Just remove the new file and rename the old file back to how it was.)

I'll let you know if I come up with another solution.

[scijones]

So, it's not very efficient for me to just take guesses here.

Is there some time that we could have a live virtual meeting to try to debug some of this? I don't know how critical those panes' visibility are to your progress with what you're doing, but it's not clear to me how to easily proceed without more information. Feel free to e-mail me: steven.jones@cic.iqmri.org

[marsaustinwilliams]

Hi there, just a fellow Soar User here, not sure if this will help anyone but the right pane is associated with Layouts, just want to sanity check, has anyone tried to click "Layout" at the top and click "Use default window layout"?

Also, if someone has a working window layout, they can save the window layout as well, and distribute that, and these layouts can also be imported via that same Layout menu.

You are also free to right click and add your own windows to the right pane. If you are still not seeing anything, then yea that may be some kind of bug with your macOS version and your Java version. The two versions you have listed were released two weeks apart from each other so compatibility issues might be possible as well, Java 21 was the last LTS version, Java 25 is the most recent LTS but since it's only been out for a month, might run into some issues there.

I hope this helps!
-Austin

[ajordanBBN]

I'm having the same problem on my MacOS system. I'm running Temurin-21.0.7+6 on Sequoia 15.6.1 (aarch64).

It might be a display theme issue -- if I mouse over the blank space on the right pane, it sometimes switches over to the I-beam text editor pointer, and sometimes back to the normal arrow pointer. I tried adding more views to the pane by right clicking and selecting "Add window to right...", but the view selector dialog is also buggy in the same way:

If I switch my system display settings to "Dark Mode", I still can't see the right pane, but the buttons on the left pane get white text, with nothing else changing colors, making it very hard to read:

This might be related to this bug in the Eclipse SWT library? That's an old version of Eclipse, and an old version of Temurin, but the symptoms are very similar.

[ajordanBBN]

If you replace Java/Debugger/lib/swt/osx64/arm/swt.jar with a newer version of SWT from Eclipse and then rebuild from scratch, it seems to work. I was also able to overwrite the version in the Multiplatform release bundle at bin/java and get good results.

I used version 4.37, and now my window looks like this:

Now on to the actual tutorial...

[scijones]

Thank you for this information. That's very helpful. I believe we can also follow the linked information about the eclipse bug to fix the debugger to not manifest this bug, but having the swt workaround for now is great.