petty

petty, short for practically enhanced tty, is a tty session starter for Linux.

Features

• support for any shell (e.g. zsh) or script (e.g. startxfce4) that can be executed
• provided xsession script that will set up X11 (with magic cookies!) and run a corresponding xsession script in the session

Installing

# make install

Configuring

Sessions can be added by putting an executable (can be a link, binary, script, etc.) in /etc/sessions for system-wide configuration or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/sessions for individual user configuration.

X sessions must be a link to /usr/local/share/sessions/xsession and there must be a corresponding xsession file of the same name in /etc/xsessions or /etc/X11/Sessions for system-wide configuration or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/xsessions for individual user configuration.

User tty configurations are in the $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/petty/pettyrc file which specifies a default shell and per-vt shells like this:

shell=zsh # the session that gets run for any terminal window, ssh, and unspecified vts

session1=bspwm # the session that gets run when logged in on vt 1
session2=steam # the session that gets run when logged in on vt 2

Make sure to set petty as the user shell as well:

$ chsh -s /usr/local/bin/petty