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Autostarting WhatPulse with Hyprland

2 min read

I’ve recently started using Hyprland on Fedora. I like to have WhatPulse installed on all my machines, and every time I switch to linux I forget how to get it working. So I am writing this up to remind myself and hopefully help others who also struggle.

Appimage

The first thing to note is that Whatpulse is only available as an AppImage for Linux. As far as I can tell this means it cannot be integrated like a normal app, so it doesn’t appear in things like a launcher. First up we have to download the AppImage and get it running. The steps are this stage are basically:

  1. Download the AppImage and save it somewhere you will remember (maybe with other AppImages)
  2. Set the file as executable, either with chmod +x in terminal or by right clicking the file in your file manager and setting it as executable.
  3. Run the file and login as normal.

Autostart

The built in option in the settings pane to “Launch when computer starts” does not work. I managed to get the AppImage to autostart by adding a line to my Hyprland config file. For me this is located in ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf. The line I added was:

exec-once = ~/AppImages/whatpulse.AppImage

With this command it launches every time Hyprland starts.

I used to have an issue where the icon would not appear in the Tray area of Waybar. I solved this by adding a delay to the startup:

exec-once = sleep 5; ~/AppImages/whatpulse.AppImage