My Love Affair With SynergyKM
When working or posting at home, there has always been a piece missing from my ideal setup. I have one Windows desktop that lives in my bedroom all the time and then when home, I have my iBook sitting on the desk next to it. I like my iBook better, (In fact I dream of one day having the money to go get an iMac G5 to replace the Windows machine) but I with my keyboard sitting in front of everything, using my iBook is a pain in the ass when at home.
Synergy was the answer to my prayers, but after downloading a version about six months ago I forgot about all of this and moved on. Today, an Engadget article, motivated me to give it a try at work today.
Of course, as you all know, its amazing. The answer to my prayers…yada yada yada…etc. You can all read the Engadget article and find out why its cool and how to install it, but upon investigating it more today at work I found a way to take this setup to the next level for those of us that have a mac.
SynergyKM is a GUI (read: point and click, as opposed to having to work it via the terminal) front end for Synergy. So instead of running “synergyc hostname” from your terminal, you can just click on a icon in your menu bar. SynergyKM even has “locations” so you can have ready to go setups for home and the office. The other big benefit: You can even turn Synergy off if you want. I know that sounds like a weird feature to like, but in the command line interface there is no switch or command to turn the program off. I had to manually kill the processes. Do you not know how to kill processes via the command line in OS X? Then I suggest you check out Synergy, but use SynergyKM on your mac.