Posted on February 10, 2009 - by dirtymitten

Holy shit! Have you heard of Synergy?

I just got a Mac Book Pro to borrow from work,and I’m trying out as many pieces of open source GNU software as I can find.

One piece, Synergy, is exceptional, and makes using all of these computers – and keyboards and laptops and little fucking stupid mini-usb mice and blueteeth and shit like that – like using one computer.

I used to think Synergy was just a really cool Half Life mod, but no, it’s also this fabulous KVM-killer, which binds your mouse and keyboard – and even disparate “clipboard” memory, into a multi-panel, multi-system wonderland of ease.

Synergy comes in two flavors: client and server. The server acts as your mother brain between all of the computers and directs the input devices of the other computers when you mouse over to them. The great thing is you browse to the edge of your monitor to focus on another computer, and there are configuration files to off-set the X and Y co-ordinates, to have a sort of “true distance” between computer monitors. Yeah, that’s right – it takes real world negative space into consideration, or whatever space you wish to make your adjustments.

Using my home desktop PC and two laptops took about 20 minutes to download, install, head-scratch, Google, and figure it out. Which means it’s bloody easy.

For the Mac, I downloaded an additional package, SynergyKM, which installs a GUI in the System Preferences pane, where you’d make adjustments to your Display, Printers, and Network settings, which is nice and convenient.