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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T03:30:29+00:00

I have a mac (snow leopard) and a windows7 desktop at work. The windows

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I have a mac (snow leopard) and a windows7 desktop at work.

The windows desktop is my primary machine.

Is it possible to get individual mac windows like xterm/finder to show up on windows desktop?

I had tried this couple of months back but couldn’t get it to work. I had tried running cygwin Xserver on windows and on mac, I tried couple of command like these:

$ DISPLAY=<windows desktop ip address>:0 xterm
$ DISPLAY=<windows desktop ip address>:0.0 xterm
$ DISPLAY=<windows desktop ip address> xterm

but mac didn’t want to honor the DISPLAY. The window would show up on the mac itself.

Before I try again, I wanted to know to ask the experts if this is even possible.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You can only do that with X11 apps that have been ported to Mac OS X. There are lots of such apps that you can get from MacPorts, but native Mac OS X applications use Quartz for their display and either Carbon or Cocoa for their UI, not XLib.

    OS X has a display server that is conceptually similar to the X server, but it is not X.

    You have a couple options. One is to get another Mac and run Remote Desktop. The other is to use VNC. VNC is cross-platform, so it should do what you need on Windows. There is a VNC implementation for OS X, but I don’t recall what it is called.

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