Gliff Client

Valentin Brosseau

About this app

Gliff Client shows the Hyprland desktop of your own Linux machine on your phone or tablet, and lets you drive it. It is a client for gliff, the open-source remote desktop for Hyprland: the picture and your input travel through a plain SSH connection, to a machine you own.

It does nothing on its own. You need a Linux machine running Hyprland with gliff-server installed, reachable over SSH. There is no account, no relay and no cloud service in between.

A PRIVATE SCREEN, OR A MIRROR

• Private screen: the machine opens a new, invisible screen at the size of your device. Nothing shows on its monitors, and the desktop is laid out for the window you hold.
• Mirror: you see and drive one of the machine's real screens, the focused one or the one you name.
• The desktop follows the window: turn the device, resize it in desktop mode or split the screen, and the remote screen takes the new size.

MADE FOR A TOUCHSCREEN

• Tap where you want to click, or switch to trackpad mode for precise pointing. Tap with two fingers for a right click, hold a finger still to drag, move two fingers to scroll.
• Pinch to magnify part of the screen, two fingers to move around it. The zoom is local: the remote desktop keeps its size.
• A physical mouse and keyboard work as they would on the machine itself.

A KEYBOARD THAT KNOWS THE REMOTE LAYOUT

• The on-screen keyboard types on the remote, with a row of Esc, Tab, Ctrl, Alt, Super and arrow keys above it, so window manager shortcuts are within reach.
• The app reads the keyboard layout of the remote machine: what you type is what arrives, and shortcuts land on the right keys, on QWERTY, AZERTY, bépo or anything else.
• With the keyboard up, the desktop is drawn smaller rather than cut, so a terminal keeps its lines.

THE REST

• Shared clipboard, for text, in both directions. It can be turned off.
• Picture-in-picture: keep an eye on a build while you do something else.
• Display scale of your choice, and an option to keep the screen on during a session.
• Web mirror (off by default): shows the open session in a browser on the same network, with optional control from that browser. The address contains a secret; anyone who has it sees your screen, and the link is not encrypted.

SECURITY

• SSH only. The app creates its own Ed25519 key on first use; you add its public half to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on your machine. No password is ever asked or stored.
• The machine's host key is shown on first connection and checked on every following one. A changed key stops the connection until you decide.

PRIVACY

• The app talks only to the machines you add. No telemetry, no advertising, no third-party service, no account of ours.

REQUIREMENTS

• A Linux machine with Hyprland and gliff-server (https://github.com/omacom/gliff), with an open Hyprland session.
• SSH access to that machine, on your network or through a VPN such as Tailscale or WireGuard.
• Android 10 or later, with a hardware H.264 decoder.

KNOWN LIMITS

• A session ends when the app is sent to the background for long.
• The clipboard carries text, not images or files.
• Dead keys of the remote layout are not composed yet.

OPEN SOURCE

MIT licence. The whole source code is public:
https://github.com/c4software/gliff-android

gliff is a free software project by Kevin McConnell. This app is an independent client and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by the gliff, Omarchy or Hyprland projects.

What’s new

• The floating buttons now also step aside for a built-in touchpad, as on a Googlebook, and not only for a plugged-in mouse.