From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 02:37:27 -0500 From: "Russ Cox" To: 9fans <9fans@cse.psu.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Subject: [9fans] suggestion: synergy client for plan 9 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 171fc362-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 http://synergy2.sf.net/ I am writing this email using the keyboard and mouse attached to my desktop computer, but the input is going into programs running on my laptop (and displaying on my laptop screen). Synergy makes this possible: you set it up on multiple computers, then you sit at one computer and use that keyboard/mouse, and if you move the mouse off the side of the screen, it moves onto the other screen. Keystrokes are redirected to whichever machine currently has the mouse cursor. It runs on Linux, OS X, and Windows. I am using it as a cheesy way to get two screens -- one for real work and one for distractions like email -- but it would be just as useful for using multiple computers with different operating systems on them. Just for fun I connected two Linux machines, a Windows machine, and two OS X machines all in a row and waved the mouse across all the screens. It really works. The software is a large pile of C++, but it should be easy to write a client from scratch (perhaps even a server, though that would be unnecessary). The protocol is fairly simple and documented in one file as simple format strings like "MOUS%i%i". It should be easy to parse and speak. Then Plan 9 systems could play along too. Russ