Tmux vim ssh sc with gui?

Questions
1

Hi, i am working on sound installation with supercollider. It will run on remote headless system with tmux and scvim logged in via ssh tunnel. It works nice but sometimes it will be nice to check things using gui.
Do you have some example scripts which do the thing ?

Running scvim on local machine works with guis ok, on remote not. I am somehow stuck…

Thank you

Paum

2

sclang uses Qt GUI objects. The GUIs will be visible on the machine that is running the sclang process.

I’m pretty sure there is no way to pipe Qt GUI objects through a terminal to display on a remote machine.

You might take a look at SwingOSC. https://github.com/Sciss/SwingOSC

Before SC went Qt, this approach ran a GUI server in Java, which SC would control using OSC messages. It was a bit slow, but it worked fairly well.

Because SwingOSC GUI objects run in a separate process, and communicate using a network protocol, it’s theoretically possible to run the SwingOSC server on your front-end machine and get sclang on the headless machine to talk to it.

But this project hasn’t been maintained in a few years. I can’t promise it will work.

hjh

3

Thank you James.

Yes I have heard about SwingOSC. I think it is also mentioned in the SC BOOK.

Anyway. It’s kinda alchemy. I had setup, when it works:

  • two machines on same network, in one room
  • ssh -XY (for transfering X)
  • some setup with export DISPLAY and maybe Xvfb (now I am in train, so can’t look exactly)
  • and it works. I had working s.meter showed on my remote computer.

For some reasons, /something else went wrong/ so I have to change script setup, and what happened was that gui windows were showing on my remote desktop, but with black content (maybe OSC information was not able to reach through network?.)

But next another stranger things happened. I decided to work without gui’s - ok, everything else worked, BUT when I connect to remote machine through internet (reverse ssh tunnel setup on Google servers), sclang failed to run. I had to change startup script again.

So that are my notes, and I would like to understand what is what.

I have to say, that working remotely through ssh with sclang running in tmux and editing in vim is very nice. One would like to thank all the software developers.

Have a nice day.