Synergy – Work Across Computers

A good friend of mine showed me this program and with a bit of help, we were able to get it running. This is going from my home computer (dell tower) to my work laptop (macbook pro). It is very handy to be able to (using my home computer), mouse over to my macbook pro, work on something, mouse back over to my tower, and continue etc. You can also copy/paste text between the computers which is pretty sweet when copying snippets of code. (I currently use DropBox to share files). I won’t do an exhaustive tutorial on how to set up synergy, as the ‘Using Synergy’ link on the sourceforge site is pretty good, but wanted to offer a few tricks to get it working:

With my setup at home, my mac book pro is to the right of my tower. To get started, choose a computer you will use as the ‘server’. (The one that will control all the computers connected in this method; in my case my dell tower):

  1. Set up your computers by entering both in the Screens box (use your actual computer names)
  2. For the client computer (in my case the mac) in the alias screen you should type ComputerName.local (this is not needed for your server computer)
  3. Setup your links. Mine read:
  4. MacName is right of DellTower (and the corresponding rules…)
  5. DellTower is left of MacName

The mac (using it as the client):

  1. All you need to do is open terminal and enter a command like this:
    /Users/username/Desktop/synergy-1.3.1/synergyc -f 192.168.blah.blah

I had to use the IP address of my dell as the computer name was not working.

I think it makes it easier having the Windows computer as the host because you have a GUI to configure it and don’t need to fuss with the config file on the mac. Hope this helps someone!

2010
03/29
CATEGORY
OPEN SOURCE
SOFTWARE
TAGS

3 comments

  1. Synergy is indeed cool, but be careful of its performance. I was using it to control a PC from another PC on the same desk and thought I had a serious performance problem in my Flash game. Turns out that the problem was Synergy using 100% of the CPU under heavy mouse movement. So if you’re going to be doing any performance testing, it’s best to grab the computer’s own mouse. The rest of the time Synergy is great! :)

  2. Thanks for the note about performance. When I am testing I will be sure to have it off and testing on the actual machine! :)

  3. Check out http://sourceforge.net/projects/synergykm/ for the GUI for the Mac. It’s much better than the GUI for the PC.

    Also, if you are having trouble with modifier keys, make sure you understand that when you edit them in the configuration (e.g. Ctrl=Crtl or Ctrl=Alt), you aren’t thinking of it as “this key does that” but rather “this action is associated with this key”.

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