Troubleshooting

Common problems and their fixes.

Table of Contents

cowser is not recognized as a command

The console script was not installed, or the script directory is not on PATH. Reinstall and check where Python places scripts:

pip install --upgrade cowser
python -m cowser --version

python -m cowser works regardless of PATH. On Windows, the bundled cowser.cmd / cowser.ps1 wrappers also work if python is on PATH.

No colors on Windows

On legacy consoles (pre-Windows 10 cmd.exe), ANSI escapes may not render. Install the color extra, which pulls in colorama:

pip install "cowser[color]"

On Windows 10+ terminals (Windows Terminal, modern conhost) ANSI is supported natively.

Weird characters on cmd.exe

When the console codepage cannot encode a character (for example cp437 and a café message), Cowser automatically replaces unsupported characters with plain ASCII. If you still see ? characters, your message uses symbols that have no ASCII mapping — stick to ASCII or switch the console to UTF-8 (chcp 65001).

Colors missing when piping

By design, color is disabled when stdout is not a terminal. To force it:

cowser --color green "hi" | cat

or disable it explicitly in scripts with --no-color.

Config file is ignored

Check the location and syntax:

  • Path: ~/.config/neostore/cowser/config.toml.
  • The file must be valid TOML — an error prints a warning to stderr and the defaults are used.
  • Command-line flags always win over config values, so a flag like --color red will mask color = "green".

My art pack is not loaded

Packs are discovered from --cow-dir, the COWSER_COWS environment variable, the cow_dir config key, and ~/.config/neostore/cowser/cows/. Each art file must have a known suffix (.cow, .txt, .art), must not start with a dot, and its stem must not collide with an existing cow name (duplicates are skipped silently). Verify with:

cowser --cow-dir ./my-cows --list | grep mypack

Unknown or ambiguous cow name

resolve_cow() raises a ValueError for unknown names, and for prefixes that match more than one animal. Use an exact name, a longer prefix, or the index from cowser --list:

cowser --cow cat "hi"      # exact
cowser --cow 5 "hi"        # by index

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