Window-per-window VNC

[Benjamin Watkins]

At 01:23 PM 6/4/2003 , Russ Lewis wrote:
>Problem: I love VNC, but I want the various windows of my VNC viewer 
>session to be in the Alt-Tab order of my machine.  That is, I want to be 
>able to Alt-Tab through the windows on the remote session, intermixed with 
>the windows of my host session.
>
>Idea: If the vncserver didn't define a full desktop, but instead kept 
>track of each window individually, I guess that the viewer would then be 
>able to display each window as a window on the host system.  I'm not an X 
>expert (maybe there are reasons why this can't work), but it seems 
>generally like it might work.
>
>Is there any utility that does something like this?  Or any comments on 
>whether or not it is possible?

I gather from your terminology that you are running VNC Viewer on a Windows 
platform and Xvnc on a Unix-type platform.  If this is the case, it sounds 
like what you are looking for is an X-Server for Windows (or whatever the 
viewing platform is).  There are several ones available for Windows, both 
free (including libre) and commercial.

Otherwise if your server platform is not running Xvnc, I do not believe 
this is practical with VNC.  VNC would not be able to grab the image of an 
application that is "behind" other Application windows; at best it could 
send a portion of the screen.  Another limitation of the RFB protocol (as I 
understand it) is that it can not change the size of the desktop 
dynamically, meaning even if you could share a single application you would 
not be able to resize that window as you can other application windows.

Hopefully an X-Server will do what you need.

-Ben : )