Document how to autostart for all platforms

It’s important that people don’t forget to turn on ActivityWatch, autostart is therefore an important feature, but we have yet to implement it.

Later we will have this managed automatically but a good start is to figure out how to do it cross-platform and add the information to the docs.

• Windows
  • Update: Autostart is now automatically configured by the installer.
  • Create a new shortcut that points to aw-qt and move it to the autostart folder
• macOS
  • Done using the ‘Login items’ config in the user settings
  • One needs to use Automator in order to create a runnable when installing from source into a virtualenv. Unsure if needed with the zip. No longer needed with the .app bundle.
• Linux
  • We should probably use the free desktop standard (/etc/xdg/autostart/ and/or ~/.config/autostart/)
    • Should be installed by the AUR package
  • Can be done manually by adding it in the “Startup Applications” menu in Ubuntu/Gnome.

[ErikBjare]

@anoopd It’s not a good idea to start aw-qt as a systemd service since it’s a GUI application.

Use the “Startup Applications” menu offered by your desktop environment as @Otto-AA did. I’d recommend using the prebuild binaries over the virtualenv, if you do all you need is to unzip it and then point “Startup Applications”-entry to the aw-qt binary.

[TomNicholas]

+1 for this - I just spent quite a while trying to get activitywatch to automatically start up reliably on Ubuntu 16.04 until I found this thread. Startup-applications works nicely though.

Also it’s pretty important - I was close to just giving up and forgetting about the application, because there’s no way I would have remembered to manually start the program every time I turned on my machine!