[elhoim]

BLUF

• Priority: medium.
• If ~/.claude/settings.json exists but can't be read or parsed (a trailing comma, EACCES/EBUSY, or a read that races Claude Code's own write), install replaced it with a file holding only statusLine. Permissions, hooks, env, model and every other key were lost.
• Install now stops with an error that names the file and the reason, and leaves the file untouched. A missing file still installs normally, starting from {}.
• The TUI now shows that error in an "Install Failed" notice. Before, it showed a generic 2-second "✗ Install failed" flash.

Details

Failure scenario. installStatusLine caught any error from loadClaudeSettings, logged a warning, set settings = {} and saved. The backups did not save the user:

• saveClaudeSettings writes .bak, but the widget-hook sync (syncWidgetHooks) runs right after and loads and saves again, so .bak ends up holding the stripped file.
• Only .orig kept the original, and the next install overwrites it.

The TUI also calls console.error while Ink is rendering, so the warning was easy to miss.

Fix.

• loadClaudeSettings already returns {} when the file doesn't exist. So on this path, any error it throws means the file exists but can't be used. Install now rethrows it as an Error that names the path and the underlying reason, keeping the original error as cause.
• The .orig backup now runs after a successful read. An aborted install therefore can't replace an earlier good .orig with the broken file.
• This matches uninstallStatusLine, which already refuses to change unreadable settings.
• App.tsx: the install catch now uses the existing flowNotice pattern (the same one "Export Failed" uses), so the user sees the message and returns to the install menu.

Test. The existing test installStatusLine should warn and recover when existing settings are invalid checked for the old behaviour. It is replaced in place by installStatusLine should abort without touching existing settings that cannot be parsed. The new test checks that install rejects with the settings path in the message, that the file is byte-for-byte unchanged, and that no .bak or .orig is written. The missing-file case is already covered by the buildCommand via installStatusLine tests, which start without a settings file.

Checks

• Red first: on unpatched main with only the test changed, bun test src/utils/__tests__/claude-settings.test.ts gave 93 pass / 1 fail (the promise resolved instead of rejecting). After the fix: 94 pass / 0 fail.
• bun run lint (tsc + eslint, --max-warnings=0): clean.
• bun run build: succeeds, and dist/ccstatusline.js is produced.
• bun test (full suite): 2317 pass / 41 fail. Every failure is a timing-sensitive test outside this change: fetchUsageData error handling (5 s timeouts), custom command capture, and several Ink TUI component tests. The machine running them was under heavy load (load average around 30–40). Running the same 10 test files on unmodified main under the same load gave 54 failures in the same tests, so they come from the environment and not from this change. No failure touches install or claude-settings.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code