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#1 2012-06-01 12:46:38

jjacky
Member
Registered: 2011-11-09
Posts: 347
Website

dapper, a simple lightweight desktop application auto-starter

Hi all,

Quickly: While I use XFCE, I don't use its session manager (or any other), and so with 4.10 I had to "write" my own starting script (startxfce4 having been moved to xfce4-session). Doing so, I figured this might be as good a time as any to look for a better application starter than what that script did, since it wasn't optimal (e.g. only read from user folder, not system one).

And when I couldn't find what I was looking for, I made one: dapper. It does just that, nothing else, and tries to follow the FreeDesktop specifictions. I say "tries to," only because there are a couple things not implemented (because I don't have a need for them, and am lazy) :
- Keys StartupNotify and StartupWMClass are not supported.
- When parsing command line in Exec, field code %c is not supported, and simply removed.

Other than that it will start all that should be started pretty fast, and you can define which desktop to start applications for (e.g. GNOME, XFCE, etc) in configuration file (~/.config/dapper.conf) or from command line.

Links:
- Source code
- PKGBUILD in the AUR

This might be useful to some of you, who knows, but note that autostarting desktop applications is probably already taken care of if you do use a desktop environment/session manager.

Cheers,
-jacky

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#2 2012-06-21 15:35:47

jjacky
Member
Registered: 2011-11-09
Posts: 347
Website

Re: dapper, a simple lightweight desktop application auto-starter

Version 0.1.2 is out, introducing options allowing you to decide which folders should be processed :

--system-dirs to process system (XDG_CONFIG_DIRS) autostart folders
--user-dir to process user (XDG_CONFIG_HOME) autostart folder
--extra-dir PATH to process the specified PATH (not an autostart subfolder)

Bonus: process will happen in the same order the options were specified.

This turns out to be pretty useful to me, because I really don’t like to have thing autostarted when I open a new session, I like things to stay fast & clean. (So I’m all for pulse or the PolicyKit agent to be started, but not much else, for instance. That’s done with a clean ~/.config/autostart and dapper -su on session openning)

However, I do start a few of the same applications every single time : web browser, file manager, e-mail reader, kalu, etc So now, I just made myself a new folder (~/.local/autostart) where I put symlinks to .desktop files of those very applications. And when I want to start it all, instead of doing it manually for each of them, I just start dapper -e ~/.local/autostart and voilà!

Note: dapper doesn’t actually resolve the tilde (~) to your home folder. That is if you were, as I did, to create a .desktop file to start this in a single click on a menu item, make sure to specify the full actual path, e.g: dapper -e /home/jjacky/.local/autostart

Also worth mentionning a few bugs have been fixed, notably dapper would crash if the config file couldn’t be opened, or a folder to be processed did not exist (fixed in 0.1.1); and parsing fields was actually quite buggy/not working (fixed in 0.1.2).

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#3 2012-07-02 23:31:54

irtigor
Member
Registered: 2011-01-21
Posts: 44

Re: dapper, a simple lightweight desktop application auto-starter

I liked it, thank you!

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#4 2012-07-03 02:25:21

jjj137
Member
Registered: 2008-12-18
Posts: 11

Re: dapper, a simple lightweight desktop application auto-starter

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#5 2012-07-03 19:48:46

jjacky
Member
Registered: 2011-11-09
Posts: 347
Website

Re: dapper, a simple lightweight desktop application auto-starter

Yeah, I tried dex, but it didn't work for me. Not sure exactly why, but I think it didn't parse the Exec key, e.g. it would leave %F or other parameters, leading to errors and whatnot.

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