Today's piece of software is one that is pretty neat. Essentially, Synergy gives you the ability to control multiple computers from one keyboard and mouse, over your network (the computers must support TCP/IP). You install Synergy on both machines (the client and the server), then simply configure them. Configuration is easy and is done on the server. You simply say "Laptop" is 0 to 100% to the left of "Desktop" and "Desktop" is 0 to 100% to the right of "Laptop". Once that's done, you fire it up on both machines and start it, and it will connect, and viola! You can share the mouse and keyboard.
Additionally, Synergy gives you the option to auto-start the process upon user login or upon computer boot, making it easy to reconnect.
It's a light-weight client (you can see the process usage in the screenshot below), and it supports multiple platforms (from their website):
- Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me (the Windows 95 family)
- Microsoft Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP (the Windows NT family)
- Mac OS X 10.2 or higher
- Unix
- X Windows version 11 revision 4 or up
- XTEST extension
(use "xdpyinfo | grep XTEST" to check for XTEST)
Ultimately, there are a ton of options out there for this type of thing. Multiplicity (not a free program) by the Stardock guys, Input Director (a free program) are two examples. There are others, and to each their own I guess, but Synergy is light, free and easy to setup.
It has downsides. The updates and changes are slow to come. It also suffers when doing processing-intensive things (in my case it's when backing up SQL databases or doing really heavy SQL queries, etc) where it will literally break the connection. Also, I've found that if I try to unlock the "server" if I've hit Ctrl-Alt-Del with the mouse on the "client" machine, the keyboard is unresponsive past the initial Ctrl-Alt-Del. But, even with those "issues", I've yet to find a program as good as Synergy.
