Autostart in Plasma 5

In the past few days as I got more and more annoyed that git pushes and svn updates and commits were always asking for my ssh key password I looked at what the current status of plasma autostart is. When I set up my plasma 5 environment I copied all the scripts that were in ~/.kde/Autostart to ~/.config/autostart thinking they would "just work" there, but it turns out they don't. My needs are simple I only had two .sh bash scripts in there, one for running ksshaskpass to ssh-add my ssh key. The other to launch synergys on login. Both scripts showed up in the autostart kcm, but neither was getting launched at login time.

Digging a bit in the code of kinit and klauncher I found that when it looks at ~/.config/autostart it only looks for .desktop files. It turns out this comes from an xdg spec for autostart scripts. Ok, simple enough, so I removed my synergys.sh script and in the autostart kcm created a new autostart item that launches synergys for me at login time. Works like a charm.

Next I went to look at ssh-add using ksshaskpass (there's a kf5 port of ksshaskpass in kdereview now by the way, which works pretty well and has some small improvements from the kdelibs4 version). For one thing, files that aren't .desktop files in ~/.config/autostart aren't getting launched, because klauncher doesn't even look at them. To fix this the autostart kcm was modified to not show these anymore.

The other question then is where should plain bash scripts be put that users and sysadmins used to put into ~/.kde/Autostart ? One solution is to put them into ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env/ . This is what I did here with ssh-add.sh and that works fine. The only thing to note though is that these are sourced, not executed, and they are sourced before plasma has started, so they can set environment variables and such if needed. This may not be ideal for scripts that need to talk to running services, so we may need to add something to ksmserver to launch scripts from ~/.config/ksm-autostart or something like that. There's a bug about it here https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=338242 already, so don't file new bugs about this issue.

Simple Elegance

I just noticed a couple of features today and yesterday in plasma next and kwin that I appreciate and wanted to thank whoever thought of adding them. Both are simple but very handy to have. I'm talking about the little X buttons on both the wallpaper configuration dialog and the kwin present windows effect. I don't use either of these features very often, but yesterday when I was testing knewstuff with the wallpaper config it was very handy to be able to delete the installed wallpaper from the wallpaper selection dialog. Then just now it was very handy to be able to close extra windows I had open that I no longer need when I was in the present windows effect looking at what I need to be doing next. Makes it very simple to clean up a workspace.

Just throwing this out there, thanks whoever added these simple nice features.