Seeking advice and information

[Duncan Ferguson <duncan_j_ferguson yahoo co uk>]

Hiya all,

I am the author of ClusterSSH, a cluster admin tool.  In essence a terminal window is opened to a number of 
remote machines and a console window - anything typed into the console is replicated to all the terminal 
windows.

It works with some rather horrible hacks and I am considering moving away from Tk to Gtk2 and would like to 
know if I can simplify how the replication is done.

At the moment, to get the replication done, i have these hoops to jump through

At program start
 - start up a terminal window for each ssh connection and set 'allowSendEvents' to true
 - run a piece of perl code to get the window ID before exec'ing ssh in the window with the correct params to 
connect to the remote host
 - grab the window ID of each of the windows and store it in the main program

When text is typed into the console
 - grab the Tk event
 - best attempts at converting the Tk event keypress event into an X window event
 - send the X window event to each stored window ID

The problems I have include the mess for grabbing the window ID and then having to convert the Tk key event 
into an X event to send on, and this event is not easily or reliably converted

I would much prefer to start up a number of Tk/Gtk2 windows with the terminal or shell embedded in them, then 
when a key press event is received i just forward on to each window - then this avoids the X event conversion 
which means the key pressed is actually the one put into each terminal and there isn't an issue with the 
terminal window supporting allowSendEvents.

Is this possible with Gtk2?  It certainly wasn't with Tk when i tried a similar approach there.  I have yet 
to write any Gtk2 code but looking at the docs there doesn't seem to be too much work to convert from Tk to 
Gtk2, but I'd certainly like to work out the potentially best way to code from the start instead of the many 
dead-ends I had with Tk until I had a working solution.

TIA

  Duncs