If you’re reading this blog, I probably don’t have to explain why I love GNU screen. I can keep a long-running session going on a server somewhere, and log in and resume my session without losing any state.

I also love X-forwarding. I love being able to log into a remote server and work in a shell there, but still pop up graphical windows (for instance, gitk’s) on my local machine when I need to.

Unfortunately, X-forwarding and screen don’t totally play nice together. When I start a screen session, I fix a value of DISPLAY in that session, while I can change it in individual shells, having to remember to do so whenever I open a new ssh session is irritating. Ideally, of course, we’d have something like screen, but for X11, so that X sessions could live in a virtual X server on your machine, which gets forward to a real X server on demand. I hear that NX does something like this, or even just a VNC window.

But in practice, I find I tend to care less about having my X windows long running. If I’m popping up a gitk to look at some commits, I will probably just close it, and don’t care about it being there tomorrow. Really, I just want a way for DISPLAY to magically track the latest X-forwared DISPLAY, so that in any window in my screen session, I can run gitk or display or such, and it will magically pop up in the appropriate X server.

So, last week, I finally wrote a script that lets you do just that. Instead of futzing with DISPLAY, it works by proxying between two values of DISPLAY. You initially open a screen with some dummy “virtual” DISPLAY that nothing is connected to – I tend to use :15:

env DISPLAY=:15 screen

Then, whenever you log in to the machine with X forwarding (or log in locally), you simply run:

proxy-display :15

proxy-display starts listening for connections on display :15, and proxying traffic between there and whatever $DISPLAY was when it was launched. In addition, it makes the appropriate xauth incants so that everything just works. It also looks for any old instances of itself listening on :15, and kills them off, to prevent leaking processes. Any connections to old instances of itself, however, that had accepted connections and were now proxying data, are left alone – so existing X windows stay open on whatever display they’re on.

So, now you can just add to your dotfiles something along the lines of

if [ "$DISPLAY" ]; then
    proxy-display :15
fi

And whenever you ssh into your remote machine and resume your screen sessions, you can run X programs and they’ll magically pop up in your most recent X-forwarded connection.

(The script, available on github, is currently a disgusting mess of shell that uses socat to do the actual proxying, and mucks around in /proc/net to find old instances of itself to kill. But it works wonderfully, so I haven’t bothered to clean it up)