xfstart mentioned in the wish list...

[Don Christensen]

Benedikt Meurer wrote:
> David Snyder wrote:
> 
>> Browsing the xfce website, I took a look at the 'Wish List'.  One item 
>> was mentioned which caught my attention -- the "xfstart" request in 
>> the "new modules" section.  The reason this caught my attention is 
>> because I've wanted to automate the startup of applications on my Xfce 
>> desktop.  For example, start firefox on desktops 2,3, and 4, xmms on 
>> desktop 4, etc.  The info. about setting application startup in the 
>> 'Desktop/Autostart' file is useful, however, the applications are 
>> dumped on the currently viewed desktop -- and I've got to manually 
>> move them around (a rather tedious task).  I thought about poking 
>> around the Xfce code to see about adding the functionality to start up 
>> applications on a specified desktop.  However, it looks like someone's 
>> already turned their attention to this.  So, *is* there a xfstart 
>> app?  Thanx.
> 
> 
> I've started work on this some time ago, but delayed it to work on more 
> important tasks first. I could finish it for 4.2, tho I'm still unsure 
> if this is of any use. The case you describe should be perfectly handled 
> by session management (the session manager will restart the app in its 
> previous state and the window manager will place the window on the 
> correct workspace). Sadly, both apps mentioned above (xmms and mozilla) 
> are broken in terms of session management and I don't see any good 
> chance that any of them will be fixed in the near future.

And given the existence of multitudes of other similarly "broken" apps,
this argues for the usefulness of a simple app to say "start app A on
desktop X".  Such an app would be useful in autostart scripts.

-Don

-- 
Don Christensen       Senior Software Development Engineer
djc at cisco.com         Cisco Systems, Santa Cruz, CA
   "It was a new day yesterday, but it's an old day now."