[Computer] Synergy

[marcmagus]

Now that I have the nifty new monitor, I have enough space on my desk to have my laptop next to the monitor without it being all cramped. Which reminded me of an especially nifty bit of software my coworker mentioned a few weeks ago called Synergy.

It's a software KM (no V, but they're talking about maybe putting that into a future version). You have a keyboard and mouse hooked up to a "primary" computer. When you mouse off the edge of the screen, the mouse teleports to the monitor of another computer, and keyboard events are also forwarded to that computer. So if all your computers have independent displays, you can use your one good quality keyboard and mouse to work on all of them. It handles clients dropping connection smoothly (your mouse just skips them). It can do some nifty stuff with connection the edges in interesting ways which make sense (only part of an edge connects to another computer, say because you have two small monitors side-by-side beneath a widescreen?). And, for bonus niftiness, it shares clipboard contents (at least text) and is supposed to be able to synchronize screen savers so the clients are slaved to the server.

The setup guide is really good, so no comments here on how to get it working. I have two computers in loop, so it doesn't matter which side I stick the laptop on. When there's no laptop, I just end up with the right edge of my screen warping to the left, and vice versa. I suppose that could get annoying, I don't know. One caveat, it doesn't play nicely with window managers which use screen edges for virtual desktop switching; they recommend you turn that off and use keyboard for that. I already wasn't using those, so it wasn't an issue for me.

Comments

[eru.livejournal.com]

Just remember that (even if those two computers are on a closed loop, e.g. a switch with just them plugged in) you should really run synergy through an SSH tunnel or else it gets way too easy for someone to snoop your keystrokes.

[marcmagus]

Good point. I'd been planning to get that set up, but I hadn't actually thought about just how important it really is.

(Funny, nobody's particularly concerned about having mouse movements snooped...)