Sharing a keyboard and mouse on two computers!

I think this is one of the most awesome and useful tip ever. It is all about a free open-source application called Synergy. What it does is it lets you share your keyboard and mouse between two or more computers. So when you get to an edge of a screen, it automatically switches to the edge of your other computer screen. The best is it works with all Mac, Windows and Linux computers, as long as they are networked. So even if you have a Mac and a PC, you can share your keyboard and mouse. It also offers a lot more than just keyboard and mouse sharing, it also shares the clipboard so you can copy on one computer and paste on the other one. I have to say, it is not easy to install on the Mac because there is no graphical interface. I won't rewrite all the installation steps, because Synergy has them all on their website, but I will add some info where I had problems. This is a link to the developer's website where you can find the downloads and the installation instructions.

Mac instructions:

1. The download will leave you with a folder. You can copy it anywhere on your system. I copied it to the applications folder. You also have to copy it to every other computer that will be sharing the keyboard and mouse.
2. You will have to edit the synergy.conf file with all the info about your computers. First, open synergy.conf in TextEdit. This is what it looks like:


3. In the "section: screens", replace "moe", "larry" and "curly" with the name of your computers. These names can be found in System Preferences, Sharing. Right under the computer name text box, it is written the name of your computer in this format: "computername.local".
4. Replace "moe", "larry" and "curly" all through the text file. In my experience, you don't need the aliases section, I just deleted it.
5. Make sure the right, left, up or down is assigned correctly in the links section. This will decide whether you change monitor on the left, right, up or down edge of your monitor.
6. Once this is all done, you are ready to open everything.
7. On the server (the main computer will be the server), open Terminal (located in Applications/Utilities).
8. Once in Terminal, drag the synergys program from the Finder to the Terminal window. It should write something like this, it will vary depending on the path:

"/Applications/synergy-1.3.1/synergys"

9. Add " -f --config " after so that it looks like this:

"/Applications/synergy-1.3.1/synergys -f --config"

10. Drag synergy.conf from the Finder to Terminal. It should now look like this:

"/Applications/synergy-1.3.1/synergys -f --config /Applications/synergy-1.3.1/synergy.conf"

11. Hit "Enter". It should start running. You are now ready to launch the client (the secondary computer).
12. On the client, with Terminal open, drag the synergyc program to the Terminal window. It should look something like this:

"/Applications/synergy-1.3.1/synergyc"

13. Add "-f server-host-name", replacing "server-host-name" with the name of the server computer.
14. Hit "Enter".
15. That's it. The connection should be established and you should be able to move your mouse (the server mouse) from one computer to the other. Copy/Paste should also work.

There is a lot more info on the developer's website about how not to have the Terminal window running all the time and how to install it in a multi-OS configuration.