A few days ago, stefan demoed x2x to me, and i’ve fallen in love with it since. If you’re not regularly working with multiple machines (like a desktop and a laptop next to it) it probably won’t be of much use, but if you do, this little program allowes you to forward mouse and keyboard events from one X server to another simply by leaving the screen with the mouse (it also allows relaying of the PRIMARY selection between displays). So i’ve put my old laptop next to the desktop screen now and use it as some kind of screen extension, mostly for IM/IRC. Here’s the ssh command i’m using from the desktop machine to spawn the forwarding without doing insecure xhost hackery:
ssh user@remotehost -X 'DISPLAY=remotehost:0.0 x2x -from $DISPLAY -east'
Note that the $DISPLAY is evaluated by the ssh shell and will expand to the display of the forwarded X connection, instead of the display value x2x is started with.
And if you want the thing to support multiple pltforms including mac os x and windows (and added bonus of a shared clipboard) you may want to look at http://synergy2.sf.net
If you use both -from and -to options for x2x, you won’t need to obfuscate the command line by overriding $DISPLAY.
There’s also x2vnc if you want to go cross-platform. I haven’t used synergy. (No preview button? Pity.)This is so cool. Thanks
I have really fallen in love with x2x. For some reason two big LCDs are not enough for me–my thirst for more screen space was slaked by x2x. I don’t use it as I would use two machines but rather to create the illusion that my primary computer has three displays. Of course, I do it in a completely insecure way, so I’ll have to try out your SSH command.