I recently changed my desk layout so my laptop is next to my mac mini’s monitor. It’s awkward trying to cram two keyboards onto the desk, so I looked into some software I’d heard about that allows multiple machines to share one keyboard and mouse.
It’s called Synergy, and I’d heard other game developers sing its praises. The problem was that running the server or client on OSX Lion was barely working at all, bit rot and API changes had broken a lot of functionality. The potential boon was large enough, and the bugs annoying enough, that I actually did the first C++ programming I’ve done in many years.
The result is a greatly improved Mac client and server available at my bitbucket repot. There are precompiled binaries too, but keep in mind, this code watches all your key presses, so you have reason to be paranoid and want to compile it yourself (I swear I’m not evil or a l33t hacker though).
There are extensive docs about how to setup and use the client and server on the Synergy site. And hopefully they’ll integrate my patches at some point.
p.s. They still use SVN and have to manually apply diff patches when they want to accept contributions from people! If they’d migrate to Bitbucket or Github they could’ve integrated these patches in three clicks.
