I had to use a GUI instead of CLI remotely (I find it hard to adjust images without seeing the preview) so I fired up this:

$ export DISPLAY=:11
$ Xvnc $DISPLAY &
$ awesome &
$ app &

Then I connected from my phone with a regular VNC viewer (all over Wireguard).

What are my options with Wayland for this kind of "ad-hoc start an app and VNC to it"?

#x11 #wayland

@michal I also wish to know, at least on ARM it was imho an unsolved issue a few months back

@michal depends on your DE. Gnome and KDE offer builtin VNC/RDP support. And there's wayvnc for wlroots based setups. If your client is running Linux, you can also use waypipe.

@bitpirate As I'm connecting remotely (imagine a cabin in a forest with 3G at best, and no IPMI on the host), needing to have configured the DE apriori becomes a chicken and egg problem - that's why I mentioned "ad hoc" originally.

Wayvnc looks interesting but the readme says "It attaches to a running Wayland session..." which kind of disqualifies it for my purpose.

@bitpirate Exploring wayvnc, it's actually explained in the FAQ:

$ WLR_BACKENDS=headless WLR_LIBINPUT_NO_DEVICES=1 sway &
$ export WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-1
$ wayvnc 0.0.0.0 &
$ app

This way, I can connect VNC to sway and the rest works as usual.

Thanks for pointing me the right way!