xmove and xpra are the alternatives to xscreen (followup to "What is the status of xscreen? Will its development ever be resumed?")

[Jason Spiro]

A year ago, Jason Spiro <jasonspiro4 <at> gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Ori and xorg list members,
> 
> Ori, you told me last year about the project you were working on: xscreen,
> a program similar in functionality to Gnu Screen, only for X
> applications [1], done for Google Summer of Code.  I am interested in
> running Xscreen: I would like to try using it to prevent my
> applications from aborting when I kill X (e.g. by accident[2].)  I
> also might like to try using it to share single applications, not
> entire Xorg displays, between me and others.
> 
> Ori, gitweb shows that you checked in lots of code to the orib-soc-2006
> branch of xorg [3], but that it was not merged into HEAD.  Did you
> manage to finish implementing xscreen?  If not, what was finished,
> what was not, and what would need to be done to get xscreen working?
> 
> Xorg people: Do you think it's likely that you will resume development
> of xscreen in the future, either by yourself or by finding more Summer
> of Code students to work on it?  ( I would not volunteer though.  
> )  Or is VNC good enough that it wouldn't be worth it to develop
> xscreen further?
> 
> Regards,
> Jason Spiro
> 
> [1] http://code.google.com/soc/2006/xorg/appinfo.html?csaid=73A89F18E7770493
> [2] Btw, Ctrl+Alt+Backspace is a pet peeve of mine.  See my feature
> request https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10507 -
> "Ctrl-Alt-Backspace should request confirmation before killing Xorg".
> [3] http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=xorg/xserver.git;a=shortlog;h=orib-soc-2006
> 

There are two alternatives to xscreen.

-  xmove (unmaintained since 1997; see http://wikipedia.org/wiki/xmove for more
info on what xmove does)
-  xpra

But xscreen is not a good choice, because it isn't done.  I spoke with Ori on
MSN Messenger this April.  He told me (I have edited his words slightly):

"I don't think Xscreen will even compile.  At the end of the summer I was
working on Xscreen, a whole bunch of APIs it was depending on changed: both
XCB's API and Xorg internals.  And in general, I was inexperienced and clueless
at the time: Xscreen still needs major cleanups.  There are lots of issues with
global resources, etc. that I'm not even sure how to approach now today.  It's
harder to write a _good_ X proxy than it looks.  I'll make an announcement if I
ever find time to pick it up again."

-Jason