Anyone who has been using multiple computers at the same time faces the problem of sharing a single mouse and keyboard with different computers.

There are many hardware vendors that provide tools to do that. They are generally called KVM (Keyboard-Video-Mouse) and it really works. What if you need to share datas between your computers?

If you have enough space on your desktop for multiple screens, I would suggest you trash all that extra hardware, and use a free, open source program called : synergy.

I was amazed when I discovered synergy some months ago , used by one of my colleagues. As a web developer, he has a PC with 2 screens. he also has an old Mac on his desktop that he uses for testing, with neither keyboard or mouse attached.

I'm in another situation where I use a Macbook with an external screen as my main computer, and I use a PC for testing. Until yesterday, I was using a small KVM switch, and when I needed to use the PC, I was frustrated by 2 things :

- my mac became unavailable
- I had to send mails between the 2 machines to exchange data

Yesterday, I installed synergy in 5 minutes. the tool is working as server on my mac, with a simple configuration file, and as slave on Windows with an application to configure it.

The application is robust and very intelligent : if the server is closed, the client tries repeatedly to reconnect. .

So, with Synergy, I found a solution for the 2 problems as it is like an extended desktop. Your mouse goes from the mac to the pc screen. You will find yourself wanting to move windows from PC to Mac too!

The most incredible is the clipboard share !  Move your mouse on the PC screen, select a text and press Ctrl-C , then move the mouse on the mac screen and press Cmd-C somewhere. Crazy, your PC text is there !

So, I have only one thing to add : if you use multiple computers at the same time, try synergy, and let me know your reactions.

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