Synergy Shout-Out

I just wanted to give a quick shout-out to the makers of Synergy (http://synergy-foss.org/). This is a nifty little tool that lets me share a single keyboard and mouse across my Windows machine and my Ubuntu laptop without any hardware. It simply uses a TCP/IP connection between the machines to accomplish this.

I’m stuck using a windows machine at work for various reasons. The reasons have been steadily dwindling over the months, but I still need PowerPoint every once in a while. Most of my development is on the Ubuntu laptop. Synergy lets me use three screens connected to my two machines seamlessly. My Ubuntu machine powers two displays and the windows machine powers one display: I can slide my mouse across all three displays. What’s better – I can even copy-paste across the two machines. Neat stuff!