synergy

AHH! BUZZWORD!

Don’t worry. I’m just talking about a super awesome piece of software. Though, I too recoil when I hear that word.

The synergy I’m talking about is a cross-platform app that allows you to control multiple computers with just one keyboard and mouse over wifi. It’s kind of a beefed up software KVM (but it shares your clipboard across!)

Building it on OS X 10.10 is a little bit of a pain (you’ll have to hack around in the python build script, and the CMake config), but once you do, it’s a fire-and-forget type of thing that just works. I’ve been happily using it with OS X and Arch Linux for a few days now.

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On Arch, I’ve riced my setup pretty hard. I use lemonbar, which isn’t technically a system tray (you simply pipe content to it when you start X). Synergy will fail to start unless you have a tray, so I just wrote a tiny shell script wrapper to start trayer and synergy:

killall synergy # in case I already have an instance running
trayer &
synergy &
sleep 1
killall trayer

Then move synergy to another desktop or group, and proceed upon your merry way.