Dynamic GUI Window Redirection?

Chris Tyler asks: "Picture this: you're sitting on the couch surfing on your tablet. You find something interesting (or funny or informative), so you say, "Hey! Look at this!" and send the window to the video projector shining on one of your walls. Or you are surfing for a hotel reservation and want to show it to your spouse before you click on 'book it'. Or you're viewing a report on your PC and the captain orders, 'on viewscreen!' With viable tablet PCs inching ever so slowly towards market, 802.11b an established technology, and more programmable pixels blinking at us then ever before, redirection capability for GUI windows will become a more and more desirable feature. X11 has some great network capabilities, but doesn't easily send to multiple displays or enable a window to be switched between displays. VNC is cross-platform and does permit disconnect/reconnect, connection initiation from either end, colourdepth mapping, and multiple views of the same desktop, but it is desktop-oriented (as opposed to window-oriented) in most implementations. Are there any good solutions for dynamic window redirection? What features would a good redirection solution include?"

Comments

Single window sharing planned for TightVNC

[kevin42]

There is a patch out there for sharing a single window (only works with the windows server right now) for TightVNC. I believe that the maintainer of tightvnc plans to integrate this functionality in the future (based on a posting to the tightvnc mailing list).

xmove can do this

[Col. Klink (retired)]

From the man page:

NAME
xmove - pseudoserver to support mobile X11 clients

SYNOPSIS
xmove [ -server server_name:port ] [ -port listen_port ]

DESCRIPTION
xmove starts a pseudoserver which allows its X11 clients
to be relocated from one display to another. Upon startup
it will create a listening port from which it accepts new
client connections. All such clients will be displayed on
the default server, until moved elsewhere. Several
clients may connect through a single xmove, thus requiring
only one per machine.

Emacs used to be able to do it

[bluestar]

Emacs used to have M-x set-display (or something like that) which changed the display for that session. I don't know for sure, but I suspect it simply unmapped itself and then mapped a new window on the new display with the old documents.

So in short, the X server doesn't seem to support it but an app can do it and maybe a window manager could fake it.

As others have said, VNC can allows multiple (simultaneous) clients.

Re:Mathematically impossible

[t]

You want this data somewhere? Drag it to a 'disk' then drag it off the disk. What could be simpler?

Congratuations you've just given props to the sneaker net. That movie was the most moronic tech-cliche filled movie ever.

Everything old is new again.

t.

xwatchwin

[BJC]

xwatchwin lets you see what is being displayed in a window on a remote X server. It doesn't let you interact or move the window, and the display isn't perfect, but it does work and it doesn't need you to set up a proxy beforehand.