6 mo. ago • 75%

[debian] What's the best way to get certain programs to run on startup (with sway)

I have been using sway (basically i3 for Wayland) instead of a traditional desktop environment because it really makes a difference in my laptops performance.

But apparently sway ignores .desktop files which was how i was autostarting things on KDE.

Is the best way to handle this by going through the sway config? If not, how would you do it.

Bonus points if you can tell me how to get the autostart programs to also open in specific workspaces.

4 comments

You can manually start the apps configured as .desktop entries in your autostart directory using dex. For instance:

dex --autostart --environment sway

Invoke the above from your Sway config and you're good to go.
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What are you trying to run? Could you add it to bashrc?

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- I want my terminal to start on workspace one. Since this is default behavior of adding 'exec <program>' to my sway config, this requirement is satisfied. I also want Firefox to start up on workspace 2. And I would like another terminal to open on workspace 10, but to automatically run cmus, a terminal music player.
  
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In case this thread turns up a google search, or anyone is keeping score, I think I more or less managed to achieve what I wanted by putting this is in my config:

assign [class="Firefox-esr"] "2" exec wezterm -e cmus exec swaymsg [app_id="org.wezfurlong.wezterm"] focus exec swaymsg move container to workspace "10" exec firefox

the only thing i don't love is that if quit cmus, it closes the window instead of bringing me back to the shell. maybe i have so chain commands or something, i don't know. i'm happy to have made it this far. Another thing is I don't know if it's possible to distinguish between the specific instance of wezterm that's running cmus, and the other one i want running on workspace 1.
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