Sickles Insight

synergy: [noun] a mutually advantageous conjunction of distinct elements

As a recent founder of Synergy, I have to take a moment to share with you the wonders I’ve unleashed!

Happenstance led me to discover the marvelous product developed by Chris Schoeneman, this product is named, you guessed it - Synergy. Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).

Wait, I don’t get it - This isn’t remoting into the computer with remote desktop, or some vnc - we’ve all done that. This isn’t a type of KVM - it’s a little bit better. This is a single keyboard and mouse controlling multiple workstations. I don’t care if its two laptops, or mac and windows next to each other - if you have a TCP/IP connection on both, you can share your favorite mouse, keyboard, and clipboard between the multiple machines.

Redirecting the mouse and keyboard is as simple as moving the mouse off the edge of your screen. Synergy also merges the clipboards of all the systems into one, allowing cut-and-paste between systems. Furthermore, it synchronizes screen savers so they all start and stop together and, if screen locking is enabled, only one screen requires a password to unlock them all! I hate coming back from lunch and having to enter three or more passwords just to get back to work. Now all screens become active again at the movement of a single mouse. Better yet - I frequently pounce on the keyboard to my left just as the workstation enters the screen saver - for those that don’t know, if you hit a key just as the system enters the screen saver, it will immediately pop back out as if you’ve been working on it, so you don’t need to enter a password or click on anything. If you are active on the primary keyboard and mouse, all workstations will stay logged in.

My guess is that many of you have heard of Synergy before, I guess I’m the dope that’s been missing out all this time. I’ll pretend that I’m not. I really didn’t even know that I needed something like synergy until I randomly found it, tried it, and loved it! How much is Synergy you ask? Well the price is really affordable - Synergy is an open source product and is released under the GNU Public License (GPL), that makes it free.

I’ve been using Synergy for almost two weeks, and I love it! It’s full of control on where you want to place each screen in relation to the previous, etc. The application does have a few quirks - sometimes the clients lose connection to the server for no apparent reason - I haven’t yet figured out if that’s me or the app, but for the most part its reliable and a huge help in getting things done more efficiently.

I will warn you from my mistake - the instructions clearly state that you must specify the movement of the mouse both to the screen and back off the screen. Example: Just because you say A is to the left of B does not mean B is to the right of A. Makes sense when I say it now, but the setup is just tricky enough that you fail to realize what you’ve done until it’s too late. Then all of a sudden you’ve moved your mouse to screen B with no way of ever getting it back to screen A. Suck. Thankfully, CTRL+ALT+DEL remains local to each respective workstation. Upon killing the server process I was able to regain my mouse.

Anyway, the documentation is pretty good, and the setup is easy. Go see things for yourself here, or just go download it and get to work!

Trackback URI | Comments RSS