Awesome WM autostart module

Warning

I don’t use this module as I moved to Gnome and Gdm. Feel free to fork.

autostart made easy

Motivation

Awesome WM is a window manager and no more. This module strives to provide a comfortable way to manage applications which should be started automatically when one opens a new awesome session.

Usually, what most users want is to define a list of system tray applications that should be started when running startx. Most people are satisfied with putting those shell commands in ~/.xprofile. However, this has some drawbacks:

No notifications when a program exits unexpectedly.
The STDOUT of the programs is naturally printed in the tty from which startx was invoked, meaning there’s no native support for log files / desktop notifications for messages which those programs usually print to the tty’s STDERR.
Sometimes, applications are written in such a way that if Awesome is restarted, the sys tray icon disappears. But if you restart them after Awesome has restarted, you do see the tray icon. With ~/.xprofile This is not possible unless you construct hacky bash scripts.
Sometimes, programs don’t exit if they were started from ~/.xprofile, one example I’m aware of is Redshift-gtk.

Awesome-autostart strives to solve these issues by putting these programs under awesome’s control.

Installation

luarocks install awesome-autostart

Usage

Import the module to your rc.lua:

local Autostart = require('autostart')

Now use it like this:

local autostart_config = {
  programs = {
    {
      -- Whether to delay the start of the program after awesome starts
      delay = 1,
      -- You don't have to use a full path here, it's only for illustration
      bin = {'/usr/bin/polybar', 'default'},
    },
    {
      bin = {'/usr/bin/redshift-gtk'}
    },
  },
  log = {
    handler = function (self, level, nessage)
      naughty.notify({
        preset = naughty.config.presets.critical,
        title = "Autostart module " .. level .. "::",
        timeout = 10,
        text = message
      })
    end,
    settings = {
      init_level = "ERROR"
    }
  }
}
-- It is recommended to put this right after all the widgets, the tags and the
-- `tasklist` are set.
autostart = Autostart:new(autostart_config)
autostart:run_all()

Configuration

Most of what’s examplified in the usage section I think is self explanatory. But the log configuration key is worth perhaps a bit more explanation:

The handler key is expecting a function that is passed to lua-logger which is essentially an appender function, so a bit more details are explained here.

Similarly, the settings table is passed to lua-logger and it is explained here.

Advanced usage

You can bind keys to raise or lower the logging level with this functions: