Getting Organized - 5 - Some Awesome Work

When we last left off on my quest for good time management, I decided to share my pizza recipe instead of being productive. Clearly, I'm making good progress. Now then, it's time to do some actual programming.

Awesome!

No, that's not your cries of joy. Awesome is the Window Manager that I use on all of my machines nowadays. In addition to laying out my windows in a pleasing fashion, it also exposes a powerful lua API for customizing and scripting, well, everything. This includes the UI, allowing for some very in-depth customizations!

Last time, I made a list of tasks to complete:

1. Automatically opening my wiki every morning
2. A simple timer that fits with my workflow
3. A way to create tasks remotely while at work

Today, I'm going to finish off the first task. Furthermore, Awesome is going to help me with that.

Hello, Wiki!

Originally, I said that opening my wiki in the morning would be "super-easy to do". I lied! I lied to everyone, even myself! And what a lie it was.

An Unexpected Snag

The easiest way for me to make programs start on launch is to add them to my xinitrc file. In this case, I actually can't do that. Because the terminal that I run vim in won't have its settings ready before my xinitrc finishes running. That means that if I use my xinitrc to bring up my wiki, the colors and fonts will be wrong and it'll have a horrifying scrollbar that looks like it crawled out of Windows 3.1.

Obviously, I don't want that. Awesome gives me the ability to run applications, so I can have it launch my wiki. Perfect, right? Wrong! To help debug scripts and configuration, Awesome provides a mechanism to restart it without closing anything. This is also great! However, this means that every time I restart Awesome it'll also open the wiki again. So, we have a conundrum.

The Solution

The second problem can be solved, but it'll take a few small additions. The goal here is to have Awesome run certain programs on startup, but only if it isn't restarting. To do that, I need to store some information across runs.

Conveniently, Awesome has an event that runs when it exits. Even better, that event tells you whether the exit is part of a restart or not! So, I simply write a value to a file based on whether Awesome is restarting or not. Then, Awesome can read the value when it starts and use it to make decisions. The result looks like this:

awesome.connect_signal("exit", function(restart)
    local lastrun = io.open("~/.config/awesome/lastrun", "w")
    if lastrun ~= nil then
        if restart then
            lastrun:write(0)
        else
            lastrun:write(1)
        end
        lastrun:close()
    end
end)

...

local lastrun = io.open("~/.config/awesome/lastrun", "r")
if lastrun ~= nil then
    local was_quit = lastrun:read("*n")
    if was_quit == 1 then
        for i,e in pairs(autostart_once) do
            awful.spawn(e)
        end
    end
    lastrun:close()
else
    for i,e in pairs(autostart_once) do
        awful.spawn(e)
    end
end

for i,e in pairs(autostart_each) do
    awful.spawn(e)
end

As you can see, it's actually pretty simple. Anything that I add to the autostart_once list will only start if Awesome shut down properly last time it ran. On the other hand, anything in the autostart_each list will run every time Awesome runs. This makes for a convenient solution that I can use as much as I want going forward.

So, that was a semi-complicated solution to a relatively simple problem. Come back next time for some tougher-but-more-straightforward scripting.