I’ve had multiple computers on my desk for ages now. Back when I was the GM at Denny’s in Big Spring, TX I had two desktops and a laptop sitting on a huge folding table because I couldn’t find a desk large enough to hold all the stuff I “needed”. Now I’ve got a much smaller apartment but still have a lot of stuff I “need”.
Desktop #1, laptop, desktop #2, wide-carriage impact printer, photo printer, laserjet, scanner, wacom tablet. It won’t all fit and the worst part? swapping keyboards….
Enter Synergy. Most of you probably won’t give two hoots about this but for those of you who have two computers and don’t want a manual KVM switch or those of you who occasionally bring home a laptop from work but hate that itty-bitty keyboard…. this may help ya out.
An Open-source program, synergy allows you to use software instead of hardware to share your keyboard and mouse between more than one computer. Simply choose the “primary” computer (the one with the keyboard and mouse you want to use) and the various “secondary” computers that will share the keyboard. The setup is simple. Only trick is remembering that even though you tell the software that your desktop is to the left of your laptop, you also have to explicitly tell it that the laptop is to the right of the desktop. otherwise, you’ll be able to move your mouse one way, but never back.
So now, I’ve packed up my laptop’s external keyboard and mouse, and use only my desktop’s peripherals. (My laptop has more processing power than my desktop). This is great because keystrokes will only go to the window with focus and I’ll not have to worry about having two keyboards on the desk and typing into the wrong one. Like searching for treo software and realizing I typed my query into a chat window on the other screen =)