It's no secret, a lot of developers such as myself are now choosing to program on Apple Computers. One nice thing is if you are a fan of Unix application with X Window System support you can sometime port these to build on the Mac. Since, Apple now ships with xterm, a X11 drawing client, you can run these apps. Likewise, because in Unix you can forward window drawing command's from one system to another, on the mac you can do the same.

For example, in the screen shot found here I am starting Gimp running on a remove server from my Mac through a SSH tunnel. (I did not load gimp on my Mac)

In order to allow forwarding of the X11 windows commands, I edit the /etc/ssh_config file. I remove the '#' in front of the 'ForwardX11 yes' command. Save the file and start a tunnel with ssh:

% ssh -C foo@foobox.com

I use the -C switch to compress data moving back and forth. Likewise, unlike VNC, X11 actually send drawing commands, not actually pictures of the screen. I can operate as though I was on the machine itself.

BTW, there are a lot of cool things you can do with ssh. Read the man page. Also, check out this article from Linux Journal.

If you have any ssh tips, post a comment.