Jason Thomas, one of the founders of CoScreen, announced that Datadog sunset the CoScreen service on July 31st. Four members of the original team spent the last couple of months building Petal, a free and open-source pair programming tool inspired by Screenhero and CoScreen.
The team recalls that Screenhero was beloved for its multiple cursors, low latency, and the ability to click a partner's editor and start typing. Slack bought it in 2015 and shut the standalone app down in December 2017. When CoScreen was founded, the goal was to build an even more seamless experience: throwing a window from one laptop onto someone else's screen with zero friction. Datadog acquired CoScreen in 2022, but the standalone product proved too tangential to the customer base and core mission. Similar tools, including Around and Multi, also met the same fate after acquisition.
This time, the team chose a different path. Petal is completely free, open source, and unmonetized. If the maintainers lose interest, users can self-host or fork it, so no one can sunset it. The team hopes the project will foster a vibrant community around collaborative screen sharing.
Petal displays shared windows as real, movable, and resizable desktop windows rather than grid tiles. Multiple people can share at once, each with a labeled cursor, and users can click into shared windows to type and scroll. Persistent rooms let teams join with one click. Petal runs on macOS and Windows, with Linux support planned, plus a web app. Media runs over LiveKit, either on the hosted instance or on a self-managed server.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing