dylanaraps/sowm

Specifying startup apps?

vaskark opened this issue · 10 comments

vaskark commented

Probably a dumb question, but is there any way to specify a list of startup apps? I'm using a login manager, atm.

Thanks.

vaskark commented

@koutsie Thanks so much for your help. It seems to be working fine. I'll report back if I hit a snag or two. I know I might get roasted for this, but including a line in config.h for a startup script would be a nice addition.
Anyway, thanks again.

koutsie commented

There's kind of no need for that but, ask dyln.
Also the way I do this is a big mess.

Leon-Plickat commented

I know I might get roasted for this, but including a line in config.h for a startup script would be a nice addition.

That would be trivial. Take a look at this patch for dwm.

aktsbot commented

@vaskark In addition to the excellent links @koutsie pointed out. Here's a write-up for setting up an sowm session.

@Leon-Plickat Thats a neat patch, but invoking the sowm and startup apps from a .xsessionrc or .xinitrc feels a bit more unixy 😅

Leon-Plickat commented

Thats a neat patch, but invoking the sowm and startup apps from a .xsessionrc or .xinitrc feels a bit more unixy

True, that's why I did not create a .patch for that. However in the case of OP, who starts sowm via a Display Manager and not manually via startx, the .xinitrc wont help much.

A Display Manager, such as lightdm for example, simply keeps its own X session alive and runs the users software in that. So xinit is never executed by your user account, therefore the contents your .xinitrc won't do anything. Instead, the DM executes a binary or script specified in a .desktop file. In this case, letting the WM execute a startup script makes sense.

And let's not pretend that anything regarding X is "unixy" in the first place.

  • 👍1
aktsbot commented

@Leon-Plickat Thanks for the info regarding Display Managers. I've learned something new today. The links that @koutsie pointed out, is the way to go.

vaskark commented

Thanks for all your replies. I decided to follow @koutsie's advice posted above and so far it works just fine. No problems that I can see.
Many thanks.

Zarhult commented

For my setup it works very nicely to just put my startups in .xprofile. I'm guessing not all display managers read .xprofile, but mine allows me to startup everything I need much the same as you would with .xinitrc (lines like compton &) even though I use a display manager. The Arch Wiki tells me that GDM, LightDM, LXDM, and SDDM all natively source .xprofile.

  • 👍1
dylanaraps commented

I think we should open a Wiki for things like this. 👍