Making renice settings stick?

[jeb1138]

I need QuicKeys to have a very low nice setting to work well for what I'm using it for. Right now I'm using Process Wizard which works great except that if I ever restart or logout I have to change the setting again. I've seen "renicer" but would rather not have another background app running and I don't like most of what it does anyway.

My question is: Is there a way to make "nice" settings stick? Some attribute you can change in an application package or some file property that I can change to make an application always run with a different nice setting?

[Darkshadow]

No, you'll have to set it every time.

[gatorparrots]

You could automate the process as a LoginItem shell script or AppleScript that runs after the desired application launches.

[AlanCE]

QuicKeys can send terminal commands and be set up to fire on a timer. So X seconds after the machine starts up, QKX could send the renice command itself, should work...

[michaelsanford]

I've been toying with the idea of renaming the application's binary (in the .app package) and replacing the original binary name with a shell utility that starts the real binary with a certain nice value.

So far this hasn't worked, but starting apps with certain nice values is important to me (like MSN and xICQ's priority, versus say DreamWeaverMX's priority) so when I figure it out I'll post a HOW-TO. It's neat to have the ability to renice applications, but I'd rather nice them from the start.

As a band-aid solution, you could always make an AppleScript (or shell script) that starts the specified application, gives it a few seconds to launch, and then re-nices it.

I wish it was a standard that every single application on Mac OS X wrote to /var/run/appname.pid, but it's not such a big issue--you can get the running app's PID by ps -auwx | grep appname and then awk-ing out the PID from the rest of the string. Keep ing mind, however, that some applications like MSN Messenger 3.5 start *2* instances of themselves, you'll want to renice both of them.