Auto-starting apps in Awesome3

Question

Hi! I've been using Awesome3 for a while now. Until now I have been autostarting apps (conky, thunderbird etc) in my rc.lua file. But recently I found out that many people use their .xinitrc file to autostart things.
Just wondering, what do you guys do, and what are the pros and cons of each method?
I am starting to think that maybe the .xinitrc way is best because it does away with the need to check if a process is already running before starting it to avoid having multiple instances of the same app running. If I start all these processes in my xinitrc script which exits when Awesome does, they are automatically killed when it exits right?
Thanks for your advice!

Answer 1

jasonwryan wrote:
I don't use awesome, but I start most things in .xinitrc as it is wm-agnostic.
If I decide to run another wm, I don't want to have to recreate an autostart file...
That's a very good point, especially since I was considering trying out dwm. I can't see myself leaving awesome in the near future, but I will probably eventually try something new and this would be a good idea in that context.
Joker, thanks for your function. This is the once I currently use:
function start_once (cmd)
-- Check if an application is already running; if not, start the application.
-- Automatically forks to background so awesome doesn't hang on startup.
command = "if [[ ! $(pidof "..string.match(cmd, "%w+")..") ]]; then ("..cmd.." &); fi"
os.execute(command)
end