After reading the title of this post, you are probably thinking to yourself: KVM. This tip is not about a KVM, rather a unique open source project called Synergy.
From their about page:
With synergy, all the computers on your desktop form a single virtual screen. You use the mouse and keyboard of only one of the computers while you use all of the monitors on all of the computers. You tell synergy how many screens you have and their positions relative to one another. Synergy then detects when the mouse moves off the edge of a screen and jumps it instantly to the neighboring screen. The keyboard works normally on each screen; input goes to whichever screen has the cursor.
Awesome.
I can see this tool being incredibly useful for PC shops which may have lots of computer running at once. This allows you to use a single mouse and keyboard to control all of them. The only catch is you have to have a monitor for each computer.
Personally I don’t have any use for this tool, but if anyone has ever used it please post your experience with it.
Jason Faulkner is the man who brings you our daily tips. He is based in Atlanta, Georgia.
Nice post. I only found out about this a few years ago, considering the technology has been around for yonks.
I’ve not used Synergy yet, but I’ve had a good shot at ThinkDesk Multiplicity (not so great and costs money) and the shareware InputDirector.
InputDirector is extremely powerful, and an extremely small program!
Will check out Synergy – thanks.
Clément
Jason, I’ve been using Synergy now for several months. It works great. When I arrive at the office, I set my laptop down next to my desktop monitors, and as soon as the wireless network becomes active, my desktop keyboard and mouse works on my laptop. Every once in a while, I have to restart Synergy on one of them, but overall its great.
You sound slightly disparaging about this program, whereas, in reality, I would class it as one of the most useful things on my computers. I have been using it for ages. I have two machines connected by an ethernet cross-over cable. One PC has two monitors and the other has one, all on the desk in front of me. Synergy works seamlessly over all three screens. Brlliant little program, once you can get your head around the slightly quirky set-up. One feature that hasn’t been mentioned is that it can copy and paste betweeen machines and that is REALLY a nice touch. Extremely useful!
All in all an excellent freebie for those with connected computers within sight of each other. I obviously can’t comment on how well it would work with more than two machines (does it, in fact?) but for my purposes, I can’t praise it enough.
I’ve used this a bit at work. I’ve got a desktop running XP and an older Mac running OS X. Being that the Mac is a little older and slower, Synergy makes it much more useful to me because it provides much more seamless, easy access to both machines. And I agree with David, the ability to copy and paste between the machines is great.