Blog - /Tech
I think that the next big thing in GUI apps should be the ability to take the exact contents of a window and send them to a remote machine. The use case for this is: you start an app at home, go to work, ssh (with X forwarding) into your home machine, and realize that you need to use that app again. Normally you'd kill the app and restart it. But what if you could just "clone" the window so that it appeared on your work machine, responsive to new input? I'd love to see functionality like this being added at the toolkit level (i.e. GTK, Qt) so that application developers would not have to do any work to activate it.
One of the nice things about running many apps in Emacs is that I already have that ability. I can just use the multi-tty support in Emacs 23 to open up either a terminal window or a new GTK frame, and then switch to the buffer that contains the app.
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Posted by david at Thu Aug 7 18:37:57 2008
IMO, this is not something which should be taken care of on the toolkit level. Why not just use some kind of terminal server? I use NX for this kind of stuff and it works like a charm.Posted by Michael Olson at Thu Aug 7 22:26:34 2008
NX has been around for a while, but it hasn't gone anywhere. If it ever gets to the point of being installed by default on every distro, then I will consider using it.Posted by david at Fri Aug 8 13:51:51 2008
Well, NX is not free, that's why it's usually not installed by default. Since there are rpm's/deb's for many distros on the nomachine site, installing it takes about a minute, and it mostly works right out of the box, since it just does everything via ssh. It completely replaced VNC for my daily work, since it supports rootless sessions and is also faster, especially over high latency ADSL links.There's also FreeNX, but last time I tried it, it still had lots of problems (resuming rootless sessions didn't work at all for me), and it was a bit difficult to install.
Posted by froseph at Mon Sep 29 23:45:14 2008
http://partiwm.org/wiki/xpra Screen for x.Add a comment