Diagnose mxr fast

When something feels off — sync hasn’t run, a draft vanished, a rule misfired — mxr gives you four lenses on the same daemon: status, logs, events, and activity. They all live one keystroke or one URL away.

Health check first

Start broad. status shows the daemon’s current view; doctor checks the deeper invariants.

# Single snapshot
mxr status

# Watch it live
mxr status --watch

# Deep check (rebuild advisories, store stats, index freshness)
mxr doctor --check --format json

What you get: a single object with daemon uptime, account sync status, lexical/semantic index freshness, and any active findings.

Read past logs without tail -f

The new mxr logs accepts --level, --search, --limit, and --since together, so you can replay past incidents without grepping the raw file.

# Last 200 warn-or-error lines in the last hour
mxr logs --level warn --since 1h --limit 200

# Past errors mentioning Gmail
mxr logs --level error --search 'gmail' --since 24h

# Stream JSON to jq for ad-hoc analytics
mxr logs --format jsonl --limit 1000 | jq -r 'select(.level=="ERROR")'

What you get: the most recent --limit lines that match your filter. With --format json|jsonl, each line becomes { timestamp, level, message, raw } for piping.

When you want the file open in $EDITOR:

mxr logs --no-follow --limit 1000 > /tmp/mxr.log && $EDITOR /tmp/mxr.log

Inspect persisted events

The event log keeps mutation, sync, and rule events with structured columns. Filter by level, category, time, or free-text:

# Mutation events in the last day
mxr history --category mutation --since 24h --format json

# Every sync error this week — search hits summary AND details
mxr history --category-prefix sync --level error --search 'timeout' --since 7d

# Page through (offset + limit)
mxr history --since 30d --limit 50 --offset 50

What you get: an array of { timestamp, level, category, account_id?, message_id?, rule_id?, summary, details }. The --search flag searches both summary and details.

Live event stream

Sometimes you want events as they happen — for example to wait on a sync that you just kicked off.

mxr events --type sync --format jsonl

What you get: one JSON object per event. Pipe it into your status bar, a Slack webhook, or jq for filtering.

Activity: what you did

Distinct from logs (system events) and events (mutation history), the activity log is a local record of every user-intent action across the TUI, CLI, and web. See the Activity Log guide for the full design — short version:

mxr activity list --since 24h
mxr activity replay --since 1h        # prose narrative
mxr activity recall "yesterday afternoon"

What you get: a reverse-chrono view of reads, archives, searches, sends. Strictly local — never transmitted off-device.

Surfaces

All four lenses are reachable from one place:

• TUI (G d): a six-pane Diagnostics screen — Status / Doctor, Data / Storage, Sync Health, Recent Events, Recent Logs, Activity Log. Tab / Shift-Tab to cycle, Enter to fullscreen one, L to open the raw log file in $EDITOR.
• Web (/diagnostics): a tabbed Diagnostics page — Overview / Logs / Events / Activity. The Logs tab supports level filter, search, row-limit, and a pause toggle for the live tail. The Events tab supports level + category + free-text search + time window + paging. The Activity tab embeds the full activity browser with filters, bulk select, and pause controls.
• CLI: mxr status, mxr doctor, mxr logs, mxr history, mxr events, mxr activity ....

In real life

• “Why did that batch archive fail?” — mxr history --search 'archive' --level error --since 1h, then drill into the details field. If it’s a sync issue, follow up with mxr doctor --check --format json | jq '.sync_statuses'.
• “What was the daemon doing during the last 10 minutes?” — mxr logs --since 10m --limit 500 --format jsonl | jq -r '"\(.timestamp) \(.level) \(.message)"'.
• “Did the prune actually run last night?” — mxr activity list --action activity.pruned --since 24h. Synthesized markers show what the daemon did to its own data.
• “I keep seeing intermittent failures. Make me a bug report.” — mxr bug-report --github opens a pre-filled issue with status, recent events, log tail, and config (sanitized).

Notifications and quick counts

mxr notify                            # unread counts for the status bar
mxr notify --format json --watch      # JSON stream for tmux, polybar, sketchybar
mxr count "label:inbox is:unread"

Agent prompts that work

"Run `mxr doctor --check --format json` and `mxr history --since 24h
--level error --format json`. Summarise findings under three headings —
**Critical**, **Yellow**, **Green** — and propose at most one concrete
next command for each. Don't run mutating commands."

"Use `mxr logs --since 10m --format jsonl` plus `mxr activity list
--since 10m --format json` to reconstruct what happened in the last ten
minutes. Tell me first what *I* did, then what the *daemon* did, then
flag anything unexpected."

Bug reports

When you need a shareable diagnostic bundle:

mxr bug-report                         # writes a Markdown file
mxr bug-report --stdout                # prints to stdout
mxr bug-report --github                # opens a pre-filled GitHub issue
mxr bug-report --full-logs             # include unredacted log tail

Or open the TUI Diagnostics screen and press b for one-click bug-report.

See also

• Activity Log — the user-intent record (separate from system events).
• Security & Privacy — what stays local in mxr.
• mxr logs, mxr history, mxr events, mxr activity — CLI references.
• [logging] and [activity] config keys.