CoScreen: Screen Sharing for Engineers

CTO of CoScreen here.

I think it's a really good question and not snarky at all.

This is honestly one of the biggest hurdles I think we have towards adoption.

We have bet a lot on the benefits of producing frictionless remote app-level sharing.

At the moment you can share one application, or your entire desktop with other tools. Then there is the friction of allowing sharing, asking for sharing, or even down to just knowing where the remote user's cursor is at.

CoScreen eliminates all of that. Anyone can share any window at any time. You see their shared cursor over your window that is translated into the adjusted coordinate space for that window.

You can be discussing a piece of code, share vim in Alacritty, or iTerm. The remote user looks up some documentation, and immediately shares it with you. Or you have a Android/iOS emulator that you want to immediately preview your work in.

Basically you're working in a shared working space more analogous to what you would experience in the office.

It's a paradigm shift from video conferencing, and traditional screen sharing tools that I think has to be experienced to be understood.

That being said it's going to be a great challenge to make this experience more transparent, and we are actively working on different scaling modes, the ability to move windows independent of remote users, and other concerns that we think will take it to the next level.

Our goal is to facilitate things like pair programming by fading into the background and just letting you continue with your normal workflow while not thinking about the tooling behind it.

Thanks for the feedback: Ubuntu LTS will definitely be one of our first supported targets.

We hope to provide some universal binary, but ultimately our testing and in-house resources for verification are limited, and we dogfood our solution every single day on every one of our supported platforms.

It will be interesting to see how widely adopted Wayland will become: CoScreen is very dependent on a lot of display server/OS level wizardry that honestly was unexpectedly difficult to achieve.

To the CoScreen folks watching this thread: Have you thought about possible ways of handling the special case where one of the collaborators has a disability and needs to use a screen reader, magnifier, voice input, or some other accessibility tool? I have expertise in this area, so maybe we could discuss it more privately.

Of course, this is also a challenge when everyone is together in the same place.

tmate.io these days, but yeah.

One option is to go with snap and/or FlatPak as a distribution method which could cover more distros.