Petal

Not yet independently verified. The launch date rests on the makers' own Show HN post of 14 October 2026. Capabilities come from the maker's own site and were not independently checked. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

Petal is an open-source desktop app for pair programming, from the makers of CoScreen, who presented it on Hacker News on 14 October 2026. Instead of showing a whole screen in a grid of video tiles, it lets each person share individual windows, which appear on the other participants' desktops as ordinary windows that can be moved and resized. Several people can share windows at once, every shared window carries labelled cursors, and participants can click, type and scroll in a colleague's window with remote mouse and keyboard input. Persistent rooms, such as a standing engineering sync, can be joined with one click without sending links. The app is free for Mac and Windows, and the maker says Linux support is coming next. Teams can use Petal Cloud, which runs on LiveKit video infrastructure with no setup, or point the same app at a LiveKit server they run themselves with one docker-compose file, so that media traffic stays inside their own network. The source code is on GitHub for teams that want to fork and build their own version.