FortKnox's Journal: Synergy

Since I'm in a cave and never heard of it, thought I'd pass it along to everyone else in case someone else hasn't heard of it. AntiFreeze mentioned it in TL's latest JE:
Synergy - Software to share your keyboard and mouse between machines, seemlessly, even if they are different OS's. Definitely some pretty neato stuff. Will try it tonight.

wow

[stoolpigeon]

that is cool but it took me a really long time to get my head around what was going on. i'm just a kvm guy in a tcp/ip world.

Moo

[ncc74656]

I played around with it a bit a year or so ago. It does what it says it does, and it does it surprisingly well, but I found it easier to use two keyboards (only Model Ms will do, please) and two mice to control the two computers at my desk. The mice are next to each other on the mousepad. The keyboards are staggered like a pipe-organ keyboard, with one keyboard in front of and at a lower elevation than the other (one is on the desktop and the other is on a pull-out tray).

Re:

[jawtheshark]

only Model Ms will do, please

My wife hates my Model M. It makes too much noise and it drives her nuts. She suggested replacing it, but I said "Thy shalt not touch the holy keyboard!" ;-) I found another Model M attached to an industrial computer at my father in laws factory. Too bad it was a German layout, or I would have "adopted" it....

As for Synergy... How does it work? I don't understand? Something like VNC, with a server and a client? I'm just wondering...

Re:

[ncc74656]

As for Synergy... How does it work? I don't understand? Something like VNC, with a server and a client? I'm just wondering...

It lets you share a keyboard and mouse between two (or maybe more) computers. You can drag the mouse pointer from one desktop to the next; keyboard input goes to whichever computer has the mouse pointer. Each computer still has its own monitor(s), so you can see what all of them are doing at a glance.

It might be cross-platform as well, but my work machines both run Windows mos