Recently I’ve noticed some of my windows randomly disappearing. I like to have a big window and 3 little windows all in a separate space, with sidebars and toolbars disabled on the little ones. I’ve noticed sometimes 3 of the 4 windows will be gone and the remaining one is on the wrong space. This morning I just finished recreating them and was staring at the screen when they all just disappeared, and a single window opened by itself. The program didn’t crash and there was no error message. Has anyone seen this? Do you use OF with multiple windows? (OF 4, macOS 14.5)
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Can you confirm you’re running the most recent version of OmniFocus 4? We addressed behavior that sounds similar to this on macOS Sonoma in an OmniFocus 4.x bug fix release.
I’m running 4.3 GM-v177.2.0 which I think is the latest. Happened again just now, very strange. I’m going to try it for a bit without having multiple spaces going (though all the OF windows would be within one space).
Thanks for the additional details! It looks like one other report of similar behavior has come in recently - we’ll look into this!
Thank you for pointing me to this thread, @ains, and for bringing the issue to the team’s attention. For reference, here’s what I posted to the Omni Slack earlier today:
It does really sound like we might be experiencing the same issue. Now that I think about it, I think I also saw both windows vanish at one point and then a new window with a single tab appear immediately afterwards.
I also have a problem with closing a window. I use Omnifocus and iCal in split screen mode to drag my tasks from Omnifocus into the calendar and schedule them. Then, for example, if I make a phone call or get a coffee and my Mac goes into standby mode, the Omnifocus window that was previously open closes. OSX and Omnifocus Pro are in the most recent version.
Noticed it still happening after updating to 4.3.1. It doesn’t happen every day, though.
This has been happening to me a lot, and it’s driving me crazy! Glad to hear I’m not the only one. Using OmniFocus 4.3.1 pro version.
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The bug still happens with the recently released OmniFocus 4.3.2.
Is there maybe any way you could increase the priority for fixing this bug, @ains? It’s very disruptive and tedious to have to recreate ones tab/window/focus state setup multiple times per day and it’s been 7 weeks now that this regression was introduced. 🙁
@parahippocampus Shoot, we were under the impression that we had fixed this bug in OmniFocus 4.3.2 (which we released yesterday). If you’re still hitting this in OmniFocus 4.3.2, could you send an email to our Support team so that we can try and track down why this fix didn’t address this issue for you?
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This is still happening to me too with 4.3.2 (v177.4.1). I keep a few tabs open and periodically the tabs just disappear and I am left with only a single tab open. Running on MacOS 14.5 (23F79).
If I have multiple tabs open and I quit OF and then reopen, all the tabs are preserved upon reopening. (i.e Mac OS setting “Close windows when quitting…” is disabled and this setting is working.
Same issue for me as well. Most recently 5min ago. v177.4.1
At the risk of being a “me too,” I’m seeing this as well: OF 4.3.2 (v177.4.1) on M2 Pro, 32GB, Sonoma 14.5. Except it almost seems like it’s crashing, because the tabs in the main window close - I usually have about four or five tabs, but one window - and the window positioning is in a default location, not where I last put it.
Thanks for letting us know this is still happening to you in 4.3.2. We’d love to track this down, but haven’t had any luck reproducing it yet ourselves.
Let’s see if we can figure out exactly how this is misbehaving:
- If you have multiple windows open and use Quit, then reopen the app, are you only getting back one window? (But in System Settings > Desktop & Dock, “Close windows when quitting an application” is turned off?)
- If you have multiple windows open and use File > Rebuild Database, does it reopen all the windows after closing them?
And here are some other questions about your system that might help us figure out the right set of circumstances to reproduce the problem:
- What version of macOS are you using?
- Is Stage Manager enabled?
- Do you use multiple desktop Spaces?
Thanks for your help!
Not meaning to contradict these other good people but it’s been doing better for me lately. I use four windows, but no tabs.
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Quitting with multiple windows: it restores them successfully. I hide the toolbar on some windows and I think it’s not great at remembering the toolbar view setting - I find I’m often fiddling with it. Maybe a separate issue though.
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I’m on 14.6.1, although I think it might have been doing better since before 14.6 came out. Possibly the OF update to 4.3.2 helped, although clearly not everyone thinks so.
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Stage Manager not enabled. I play with it from time to time but mostly end up turning it off.
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I keep OF on a separate space.
With these recent OS updates I haven’t had a long uptime, so going to test further when it’s been running for a while.
Hope I’m not speaking too soon…
Thank you for following up on this, @kcase! I have answered most of these questions already when someone from support sent them to me via email, but it’s probably good to include that informationen here as well.
No, quitting and reopening OmniFocus does not seem to trigger the issue. I’ve done it 7 times in a row as a test (since I almost never quit OmniFocus) and all tabs in both windows were still there (“Close windows when quitting an application” is also turned off on my Mac).
This did not result in an error message, but when it was done, only one window was reopened instead of the two that I always have open. Something pretty weird had also happened:
The tabs that were previously spread across the two windows were merged into a single window and some, but not all, of the tab titles no longer matched the contents of the tabs (i.e., the tab titled “Projects” was actually showing the “Changed” perspective, etc.). When I switched to a different perspective in one of those mislabeled tabs, the tab title still remained unchanged. For tabs with a correct title, the tab title was always properly updated when I switched to another perspective. After restarting OmniFocus, all tabs were properly labeled and the titles were once again properly updated when switching perspectives.
Not sure if this is related to the present issue, but it definitely seemed noteworthy.
- I was on macOS 14.5 when the issue started (after I had updated OmniFocus to 4.3) and continued to encounter it on macOS 14.6.
- Stage Manager is turned off
The only time I (involuntarily) use spaces are when watching a browser video in full screen – which does not happen often, especially not during a work day, which is when I seem to encounter the present issue more frequently. I never put my OmniFocus windows (or the windows of any other app) in macOS’s Full Screen Mode.
It just occurred to me that I technically do use two spaces whenever my external 4K display is connected to my MacBook Pro (2020, Intel w/ 4 TB ports), since “Displays have separate Spaces” is turned on on my Mac (which I think is the default setting). The two OmniFocus windows are always in the main space (which is the external display, when it is connected).
For resizing/rearranging windows, I have a self-written AppleScript that is automatically run 15s after connecting or disconnecting that external 4K display to my MacBook Pro. Aside from that, I rarely change the size of my OmniFocus windows. One time, the present issue (i.e., that all tabs except for the current tab in the current window were gone) happened a few seconds after that AppleScript was automatically run when the system was under heavy load, but all the other times, the issue happened long after this AppleScript had been previously run, so my impression is that the issue does not seem to be closely related to (dis-)connecting an external display / adding a space that way or to window resizing.
I use only one window but with multiple tabs. When I opened a few more tabs and then closed - opened, the tabs were there as expected.
“Close windows” is turned off, and has been.
Similar response: the one window with the tabs I expected were there.
14.6.1, updated just yesterday, but it did it today, too, so, for me, it doesn’t seem tied to the OS.
Negative, Ghost Rider.
Yes.
Just wanted to confirm that the bug still happens with OmniFocus 4.3.3 (v177.7.0).
Same here. Multiple tabs randomly disappear and am left with a single open tab. Using OF 4.3.3 and Sonoma 14.6.1 (23G93). If I quit with multiple tabs open and re-open OF, the tabs are properly re-opened.
Now split screen will no longer be interrupted in sleep mode. Nevertheless, I’m now using Omnifocus 3 on my MacBook again because I can’t use the split screen with iCal properly with version 4. I’m really annoyed. It took forever for Apple to re-enable drag and drop with iCal. Then the Omnigroup comes and mainly tinkers with the design of Omnifocus, everything becomes pale and unstructured and then the window expands, when you activate the inspector and pop it, the split screen disappears. With version 3 everything works perfectly. Although I have used Omnifocus for many years, I will look for an app from another provider. Today I sat in the café for almost 1 1/2 hours and had to review and edit my hundreds of tasks and plan many in iCal because I was very annoyed. I got really angry when I had to make changes in the inspector in split screen mode, then turn off split screen mode, change the task and start split screen mode again. Luckily I still have Omnifocus 3 on the MacBook and I calmed down again. At my software company, I would never have had the crazy idea of automatically changing window sizes in the software. 😡
