Systray icon integration on Windows

[Saviq]

The missing bits:

• icon in Start menu
• autostart handling

The former should be straightforward, with the one caveat that ideally we'd check if it's already running to avoid spawning a second copy. That can come later, though.

The latter I think we can attack in steps:

1. add launching the icon to the current user's HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run - use --autostart flag to tell the binary that it is autostarted
2. add a multipass set client.gui.autostart boolean and, if false, exit when ran with --autostart
3. have the above multipass set… add/remove the Run key above
4. add an option in the NSIS installer whether to add the Run entry at all

We can spawn separate issues from the above bits, and not all of them need to be done in v0.9.0.

[ricab]

Ouch, I missed the edit! Only saw the text now (was empty before IIRC)... Fortunately I was going in the same direction 🙂 A few comments:

• Nice thinking with the flag, but I'd propose calling it --autostarting instead, to better signal this is really a declaration rather than a request/option
• why the redundancy between 2 and 3, as well as these two and 4? I'd rather have a single source of truth, so just 1 and 2 all the time. That would apply nicely on other platforms too. Keeping the setting from one installation to the next would also be simpler (just keep the settings file).
• Do we always want to use HKCU? Shouldn't that be tied to the already existing question on the scope of the PATH change? There is also SHCTX... (perhaps this can be tweaked later)

[Saviq]

As for the flag, it's quite internal, so whatever we call it is fine.
As for redundancy my thinking was that we could avoid running the binary altogether if the user disabled it. People also look into their registry and might be unhappy if they see Multipass there even if they disabled it.
We want the NSIS bit to let the user choose during install whether they want it autostarted at all or not.

FWIW it's not the highest priority - as long as we have the user experience working, we can optimize (i.e. add/remove the Run key) and extend (add the NSIS option) later.

[ricab]

To keep things sane here for posterity, over discussion we decided to simplify the autostart part for now. So for this first approach, we rely solely on the installer to place the required reg key. This implies a couple of differences relatively to the issue description:

• the key is actually in HKLM rather than HKCU, so that it affects all users and not just the one installing
• there is no option in the installer, since we need the key to be there all the time

In addition, the full reg-key path includes WOW6432Node explicitly, as explained here.

Later on, we intend to implement the autostart toggle by installing/removing the key directly. At that point, the key scope should change to HKCU and the installer will offer an option to put it there by default.

[ricab]

CanonicalLtd/multipass-private#177 adds an item to the start menu. Not really an "icon" though I am afraid...