Teleport
The typical setup in my office is that I have my G5 powering two monitors front and center, and the powerbook beside them, on a (modified) iCurve for ergonomic viewing. While this is great for the displays, it leaves the problem of controlling the laptop. At one point I had a KVM switch set up, but the hassle of plugging in a USB cable and flipping the switch led me to just type un-ergonomically on the laptop’s keyboard.
Then I came across Synergy. It’s a cross-platform tool that lets you send your keyboard and mouse commands to other machines on your network–sort of like VNC without the screen-sharing (since the other screen is right in front of you). The Synergy team’s most brilliant innovation, though, is the interface for switching machines. Basically, you can configure your machines so that when you roll your mouse pointer off the edge of one machine’s screen, it magically appears on the corresponding edge of a different machine’s screen. You can roll your mouse from your Linux box across your Windows box over to your Mac in one smooth motion. It’s like the way that multi-monitor setups work, except that under the hood it’s seamlessly switching to sending your input to another machine over the network.
I’ve been using Synergy for a few months now, but it’s not without its rough edges. Last time I did it, configuration was a text-editing affair, though the SynergyKM preference pane add-on for Mac OS X makes things much more automatic. I also tended to experience general glitchiness on OS X. A vestigial mouse pointer would often remain on my main monitor, twitching distractingly, as I controlled the laptop. It also didn’t handle modifier and function keys, meaning I still had to press the function keys on the laptop directly to trigger Exposé.
Enter Teleport. While (or perhaps because) it’s Mac-only, it solves most of the problems I had with Synergy. The configuration is a breeze (using Rendezvous AKA Bonjour), and input forwarding is smooth and comprehensive. It also seems to automatically sync clipboards well, something that I was using Erik Lagercrantz’s ClipboardSharing utility for until he failed to update it for Tiger.
So far, I only have a few minor critiques. First, it doesn’t appear to allow you to put two remote screens side-by-side–the remote screens must be adjacent to the main computer’s screens. Also, it seems to hit the disk every time I roll over the boundary between two machines, which is audibly distracting and causes an annoying delay in which mouse motion isn’t counted on the new screen. Even so, I think it will be a part of my desktop setup from now on. Thanks Julien!