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Comment by MarkSweep | Hacker News Reader

It’s cool to see the “move your mouse between computers” concept become more widely available. I worked as an intern at TideBreak in 2007. Their product PointRight was based on work the founder did at Stanford in 2000. It let you move your mouse from one computer to another:

http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/pointright/

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Ages ago, when I had a small Hackintosh netbook and a Mac mini, I used a great little app called Teleport to do this, and it was great.

Apple's UI for establishing the connection — the little squish and pop thing that happens on the first attempt — is really brilliant. I think it's likely to cause some consternation when it doesn't work perfectly (as is their bias), but if it works well it'll be a great boon for those of us who like to use multiple computers at once.

I wonder how they detect device orientation. That part is utterly magical to me.

Probably UHF, but could also be some sonic thing.

There was a program called CosmoSynergy in 1996 that lets you share a mouse between computers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synergy_(software)

There is a fork of it called "barrier". Using it every day.

https://github.com/debauchee/barrier

I used x2x as well for X11 a very long time ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X2x

I worked at Symless, which sells a commercial version of Synergy, for a couple of years.

Barrier (a FOSS fork of Synergy) and Synergy are the only solutions that work across all 3 major platforms (macOS, Windows and Linux/X11)

Unfortunately they're buggy as hell, feature incomplete (no drag and drop), and ipadOS and anything Wayland based is unsupported. You also can't control macOS input unless the user manually grants permission (after installation) and on Windows there are still issues with privileged screens by default.

Imho the best commercial cross-platform (Windows and macOS only) tool for the job is Sharemouse, which has a bunch of value add features like multi-machine lock and unlock.

I currently use Barrier to control three computers (Mac, Windows 10, and Raspberry Pi) from my Mac laptop.

https://github.com/debauchee/barrier

Also Teleport - it’s been around for years. Very handy for multi-Mac workflows. No drag and drop though.

https://github.com/johndbritton/teleport

I've used x2x[0] (released 1996) in the past. One neat thing about x2x was that it only needed to be installed on of the machines and controlled the pointer and keyboard through the X11 XTEST protocol. It was magical how well it worked.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X2x

Microsoft have a semi-official Windows only solution called "Mouse without Borders"

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=354...

Sharing mouse and keyboard isn't so exciting, but D&D demo is exciting. I wonder what type of object supported.

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