[Sugar-devel] Sharing in Terminal

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

Hello,
While going through  Ben Schwartz's Shared Term feature proposal
discussion page
(http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Talk:Features/Terminal_Sharing), I
started to wonder if we could somehow implement "readonly" mode for
sharing in the Terminal activity.
After a weekend of hacking : I have managed to come up with the following:

* First user shares Terminal - nothing in the UI changes
* Second user joins - and gets a split screen: on the top, the shell
running in her own machine, and the lower half showing a read only
version of the Terminal Activity canvas in the first user's machine
* Third user and so forth get the same experience as the second user.

http://people.sugarlabs.org/sayamindu/shared_terminal.ogv shows a very
barebones implementation of this. I was wondering if this would be
useful, and if so, what would be the extra UI elements ? Probably
there should be some way of showing the first user who has joined (in
the activity itself), and for the other users, there should probably
be some way to indicate/differentiate the read-only part and the
read-write part.

Of course, this has got a lot of limitations (the major one being that
only plain text elements can be transferred, etc). I'm using the
accessibility features of the VTE widget to scrape the screen and then
sending the data across.

Thanks,
Sayamindu

-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]