Remote X Apps mini-HOWTO: A Little Theory

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## 4. A Little Theory

The magic word is `DISPLAY`. In the X window system, a display consists (simplified) of a keyboard, a mouse and a screen. A display is managed by a server program, known as an X server. The server serves displaying capabilities to other programs that connect to it.

A display is indicated with a name, for instance:

- `DISPLAY=light.uni.verse:0`
- `DISPLAY=localhost:4`
- `DISPLAY=:0`

The display consists of a hostname (such as `light.uni.verse` and `localhost`), a colon (`:`), and a sequence number (such as `0` and `4`). The hostname of the display is the name of the computer where the X server runs. An omitted hostname means the local host. The sequence number is usually 0 -- it can be varied if there are multiple displays connected to one computer.

If you ever come across a display indication with an extra `.n` attached to it, that's the screen number. A display can actually have multiple screens. Usually there's only one screen though, with number `n=0`, so that's the default.

Other forms of `DISPLAY` exist, but the above will do for our purposes.

For the technically curious:

- `hostname:D.S` means screen `S` on display `D` of host `hostname`; the X server for this display is listening at TCP port `6000+D`.
- `host/unix:D.S` means screen `S` on display `D` of host `host`; the X server for this display is listening at UNIX domain socket `/tmp/.X11-unix/XD` (so it's only reachable from `host`).
- `:D.S` is equivalent to `host/unix:D.S`, where `host` is the local hostname.

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