2009/4/1 Brian J. Murrell <[email protected]>:
> Let's say I start xpra and an X server for the physical display on
> machine A such that all that the physical X server does is connects to
> the xpra display (i.e to provide total portability of all apps on
> machine A and also insulate the X clients from X server restarts) and
> then start some applications... some gnome-terminals and firefox and I
> have an evince there too.
>
> Now I go to machine B, and want to bring just the evince application
> from machine A to machine B (maybe machine B is a laptop I want to take
> to the can with me and continue reading my document in the evince
> instance :-).  Can I connect to the xrpa instance on machine A and have
> it bring just that one window to machine B?

Not at the moment. In principle, one could teach the client to only
display some subset of the windows that the server offers it. However,
the way X works makes this tricky. The main problem would be that most
apps create multiple X level "windows" (for instance, dropdown menus
are implemented by creating a new toplevel window), and there is no
reliable way to figure out which windows are part of that "one app".

To make this really work, one would need the apps to tell the window
manager which windows "belong to them". However, because window
managers have traditionally ignored menus and other such temporary
windows, no apps currently do this, and there's no spec saying that
they should.

> Also, can I simultaneously share a single application, say a
> gnome-terminal window between two machines which I might be running back
> and forth between?

No, sorry. The problem is that you'd have to somehow arrange for the
gnome-terminal window to be exactly the same size and positioned at
exactly the same position on both desktops. But there's no way for the
xpra client to guarantee that...

(Well, I guess xpra could pretend to be a pager app, and when you
moved/resized an app on one screen it could inform the window manager
on the other screen that the user had just requested a move/resize.
But the required code would need to be written, and you'd still need
some sort of fallback for when the window manager refused. Plus it
would still be annoying to users.)

(For the gnome-terminal case, you can just use screen... ssh in from
one machine and type 'screen', then ssh in from the other and type
'screen -x'...)

-- Nathaniel

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