On Mac 10.14.4 yEd will appear to start to open and then close immediately.

Question

yEd was working well a couple weeks ago and now is no longer working.  It appears to start to open and then closes about 2 seconds later according to the icons at the bottom; no window ever opens.  I wonder if it is related to Java developer kit being installed.

I tried deleting the library folder as suggested in the forum by a message in 2012.  That did not work.  

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the application.  That also was not successful.

I tried reinstalling java, but that was not successful.  

I tried rebooting my machine to no luck.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks.

Comments

I doubt that installing a JDK will adversely affect a yEd installation - we have like ten different versions of the JDK installed on our macOS test machines and yEd runs just fine.

You could try to run yEd from a terminal/console for debugging purposes, though. To do that, open a terminal and enter
  [path/to/java_home]/bin/java -jar [path/to/yed_install_dir]/Contents/Java/yed.jar

[path/to/java_home] is usually something like "/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-11.0.1.jdk/Contents/Home".
[path/to/yed_install_dir] is usually "/Applications/yEd.app".

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Thanks.  

I ran
/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-12.0.1.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/java -jar /Applications/yEd.app/Contents/Java/yed.jar

And it produced the following error message (including the unusual characters) .   Any suggestions on what it means?  

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
    at java.desktop/java.awt.Window.init(Window.java:499)
    at java.desktop/java.awt.Window.<init>(Window.java:539)
    at java.desktop/java.awt.Frame.<init>(Frame.java:423)
    at java.desktop/java.awt.Frame.<init>(Frame.java:388)
    at com.yworks.A.P.Q.<init>(Unknown Source)
    at com.yworks.A.D.ć(Unknown Source)
    at com.yworks.A.D.Ă(Unknown Source)
    at com.yworks.A.D.ā(Unknown Source)
    at com.yworks.A.yEd.ā(Unknown Source)
    at com.yworks.A.yEd.main(Unknown Source)

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Uh, this is bad - really bad. It means that Java is not able to create native frames/windows on your machine.
I will try to reproduce the error, but since this happens right on startup we should have encountered this problem in our pre-release tests if this was an issue for our test machines as well. To be honest, even if I can reproduce the error, I am not sure it can be fixed on our side.

In the meantime, can you uninstall yEd and install the variant that comes with embedded Java 8 runtime environment? A corresponding macOS disk image is available from https://www.yworks.com/downloads#yEd.

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I could not reproduce this crash - neither on macOS 10.13.6 (mac mini) nor on macOS 10.14.4 (mac book pro 15").

Since this error happens for both your manually installed JDK as well as the JRE embedded into yEd.app, it sure seems that Java has some serious problem with your machine. Unfortunately, I have no idea what that could be or even how to determine what it could be. :-(

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Thanks for you suggestions.  I tried the version with Java 8 embedded, and encountered the same problem.  Which seems to imply the Java is seriously messed up.

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Upgrading my OS to 10.14.5 (18F132) seemed to fix the issue.

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That is very good news!

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Experiencing the exact same as above, and am currently running 10.14.6

bash-3.2$ java -jar /Applications/yEd.app/Contents/Java/yed.jar
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
        at java.awt.Window.init(Window.java:497)
        at java.awt.Window.<init>(Window.java:537)
        at java.awt.Frame.<init>(Frame.java:420)
        at java.awt.Frame.<init>(Frame.java:385)
        at com.yworks.A.P.Q.<init>(Unknown Source)
        at com.yworks.A.D.ć(Unknown Source)
        at com.yworks.A.D.Ă(Unknown Source)
        at com.yworks.A.D.ā(Unknown Source)
        at com.yworks.A.yEd.ā(Unknown Source)
        at com.yworks.A.yEd.main(Unknown Source)

*EDIT* - This was resolved by installing the latest java and rebooting. Weird.

Answer 1

This is happening because yEd remembers the window size in use from the previous session. I run into this problem whenever I start yEd only on my laptop after having run it on a large monitor. Does anyone know where the previous window size configuration is stored for yEd?

Comments

Such information is stored in the yEd profile directory.

A word of warning: Deleting the profile directory will also delete any user-defined palette sections and custom properties mapper configurations as well as reset any custom preferences to their factory defaults.