Show HN: X11 tool to share a screen area in any video meeting

I love how simple this is- Barely 100 lines or C++ (ignoring comments). That's one thing that makes me prefer X11 over Wayland.

Yeah. I mean, not to deny the decades of arguments over its warts, but it's kind of amazing to me the extent to which X11 has emerged as, well, the simplest/best and most hackable desktop graphics environment available. You want to play a trick, it's right there. The ICCCM got a ton of hate back in the early 90's, but... no one else has an equivalent and people still innovate in the WM space even today.

Hackable is right. But not always in the positive sense of the word.

I find it very interesting how much our threat model has changed in the last 10-15 years. We no longer trust even local software, as we have to assume everything is now malicious. Commercial software from "reputable" companies can't be trusted to not pull a ton of analytics and personal data off your computer. We now have to worry about every piece of software being a keylogger and spying on other windows/applications and reporting back.

We've had to give up so much flexibility. Wayland certainly focuses on plugging this hole, but it means we've lost all these cool utilities like this one. There was just so much you could do with devilspie, xdotool, and others to make sure my operating system and window environment worked for me.

I still really miss X11's Zaphod mode, where you had two independent X sessions (:0.0 and :0.1) on two different monitors, with different window managers and different windowing rules.

I miss the days of being able to trust my computer and trust my software.