The puredata help text includes a mention of "connecting to a GUI over a port":

-guiport <n>     -- connect to pre-existing GUI over port <n>

Does this mean it's possible to run a server-client setup (like supercollider)? I'm interested because I'm running some audio out on a Raspberry Pi and needing to troubleshoot the patch, but running the GUI over ssh -X is too much for the poor little box and interrupts the audio processing (especially since, IIRC, the GUI is also running on the audio thread in pd). I'd like to be able to debug the patch running headless on the pi with the GUI running on my ssh client machine.

Is it possible? Have you done it? Do resources exist somewhere?

@driedstr I've never done it but basically the pure-data "front-end" is an application "shell" that is a wish (tcl/tk) interpreter. It and the actual pd program are separate processes that communicate over a pipe.
That doesn't mean all of the graphics are all handled by tcl/tk. Tcl/tk reports mouse movements and button presses to pd, which then does all of the object geometry/object creation and then sends messages back to the tcl/tk process to draw the objects in the window.
So yes, it should definitely be possible to have the tcl/tk process on a different computer than the actual pd process.
I'm not sure how to actually go about it but you might start here: https://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2007-08/052611.html

@seb-harmonik.ar hmm, thanks for the info. It seems like it would take a bit of hacking to bridge the pipe between the two machines. Also seems a little less beneficial than I'd hoped, the separation of the DSP from the rest of the application isn't as clean as in supercollider.

@driedstr I think you can also run Pd headless on the Pi and control it from another instance via OSC. You would have to build the communication between Gui instance and headless instance yourself.