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):
- Set up your computers by entering both in the Screens box (use your actual computer names)
- 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)
- Setup your links. Mine read:
- MacName is right of DellTower (and the corresponding rules…)
- DellTower is left of MacName
The mac (using it as the client):
- 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!
