When I run applications (such as email and web browser) on two different remote machines using SSH X-Windows forwarding they can correctly open URLs in the other application. So clicking on a HTTP link in an email launches that URL in the browser. Clicking on a mailto link on a web page launches that in the email program. If there is a name for this process I don't know what it is. Firefox talks about it here. https://www-archive.mozilla.org/unix/remote.html
X2go provides me with much better performance than standard X forwarding but the URL magic doesn't seem to work. The email program launches a browser on the machine it is running on rather than the existing browser. The browser does the same thing with mailto links.
The firefox link seems to suggest this magic is done with the X toolkit, intrinsic properties, and actions. There is also the MIME database to look at, and I think D-Bus might be involved. If I can figure out how it works with X forwarding perhaps I could write a patch for X2go or write a wrapper script around it that makes that possible.
Can you steer me in the right direction to understand this process and what x2go code I should look at?
For reference I am running openSuSE 42.3 on an X86_64 machine with the KVM hypervisor. I am using an XFCE desktop. The "remote" machines are running on virtual machines under KVM on the same hardware. My email client is Evolution 3.12.11 running on one VM and my browser is Firefox 57 running on another.
I have tried both the X2goclient 4.1.0 (which I guess is C) and pyhoca-gui 0.5.0 which should be python. Maybe there is a configuration option I need to use that I missed. I can't find anything in the documentation about this feature, although it would help if I had a name for this bit of magic.
If this feature isn't already there I would be pleased to write, test and submit a patch.
Thanks. Bill