Systemd service for client autostart instead of xdg-autostart

[Jai-JAP]

Use a systemd service to launch the client on login instead of using the xdg-autostart .desktop file.

This will essentially serve the same purpose to autostart the client on user login but will have the systemd backend just as for keymapperd.

It allows us to properly control client's execution and triggering on a per user basis using systemctl instead of having to modify the .desktop and copying it to user's autostart directory.

This will have both the autostart tasks to only use systemd for handling, instead of them having different approaches.

The systemd service file for this would look like

[Unit]
Description=Keymapper Client

[Service]
ExecCondition=systemctl is-active keymapperd.service
ExecStart=keymapper

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Important to note that this unit file needs to be placed in /lib/systemd/user/keymapper.service in order to make it as a user unit.

[houmain]

I do not have experience with starting normal user processes with systemd.
I just tried it, but could not get it to work (on X11/Xfce/lightdm). The tray icon did not appear...

[Unit]
Description=Keymapper Client

[Service]
ExecCondition=systemctl is-active keymapperd.service
ExecStart=keymapper -v -u

[Install]
WantedBy=graphical.target

Maybe I could change keymapper to dynamically create the tray icon, initialize the context awareness, ... when the desktop environment is ready.
@Jai-JAP does this functionality work for you?

[Jai-JAP]

Yeah the tray icon seems to break with this change, and dynamically creating it may fix the issue.

[ristomatti]

Edit: I wrote most of this before @houmain posted the comment above and noticed it right after submitting.

Reply to #247 (comment)

I think #231 would be a lot more legible approach to autostart keymapper and will also fix this issue of having to deal with special handling of /etc in CMake.

@Jai-JAP, with this approach Keymapper would have to be started w/o the tray icon. This also starts keymapper also when logging in through console. While some might want this, I don't think it's a good idea as default. I tried this today. I also noticed some unexpected behavior with some of my mappings. E.g. the text expansion hotstrings with prefixes : or // defined here https://github.com/ristomatti/keymapper-config/blob/main/include/text_expansion.conf triggered by just typing the alphabetical part.

There's also a slightly different systemd unit file described here #241 which makes keymapper start only after logging in to a graphical session. I did some tests with a unit file like this:

[Unit]
Description=Keymapper client
Requires=graphical-session.target
After=graphical-session.target

[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=3
ExecStart=/usr/bin/keymapper --update --no-notify

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

This didn't work as expected either. keymapper did start, but still without the tray icon. It also appeared to have been started with some environment variables missing. For instance, it could not execute i3wm commands using i3-msg (missing I3SOCK environment variable is my guess). It also had the same unexpected behavior described above. Things started working as expected only after systemctl --user restart keymapper.

[Jai-JAP]

This also starts keymapper also when logging in through console. While some might want this, I don't think it's a good idea as default.

I agree that it should not be the default for non-graphical users as the console part seems to be a bit broken. My keyboard's CapsLock Indicator doesn't seem to work anymore with the following config

CapsLock{!200ms} >> Escape
CapsLock >> Control
CapsLock{Any} >> Control{Any}
Shift !150ms Shift >> CapsLock

[alterNERDtive]

This didn't work as expected either. keymapper did start, but still without the tray icon. It also appeared to have been started with some environment variables missing. For instance, it could not execute i3wm commands using i3-msg (missing I3SOCK environment variable is my guess). It also had the same unexpected behavior described above. Things started working as expected only after systemctl --user restart keymapper.

Make sure that it starts after whatever provides your systray. E.g. my services that have tray icons all have

After=waybar.service

(for Sway).

[ristomatti]

In my case that would be i3bar and it's not started by systemd. Same goes for i3 itself...

[alterNERDtive]

Same thing applies. You’ll still need to make sure that is running first.

[Jai-JAP]

I am unable to get it started at all. It fails with the error

X connection to :0 broken (explicit kill or server shutdown).

Running Gnome on Wayland so it shouldn't go the Xorg path