Remote X

[Russell Shaw]

Hi,
Is remote execution of X clients away from the X server still regarded
as a design goal, or does everyone just develop for client applications
that only run on or close to the X server machine?

With a unicode text widget, every time a character is entered, the
line or paragraph(s) need to be moved and/or reshaped. This can mean
sending a few largish bitmaps for every key press. Other toolkits
may add new polygon tesselated glyphs to the XRender cache:

http://www.keithp.com/~keithp/talks/usenix2001/
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/proto/renderproto/plain/renderproto.txt

With a cursive font, all the cursive glyphs on a line could compress
when the line is close to full, but before the need for a linebreak.
That would stress out the cache advantage of XRender. Another problem
with XRender is that it's computationally expensive for small systems
without polygon hardware.