dapper 0.1.2 released
As I explained before, I don't use a session manager, and when I needed something to take care of handling the autostart of Desktop applications for me, and couldn't find anything what I wanted, I made dapper.
Until now it only followed the FreeDesktop specifications, that is started
things according to .desktop files found in user & system autostart folders.
In that order, in fact.
Version 0.1.2 now works differently, 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).
Download
dapper is released under GNU GPL v3+ The source code is available on this BitBucket repository, where the issue tracker welcomes bugs/suggestions.
The release tarball can be downloaded here; and Arch Linux users can use the PKGBUILD in the AUR.