Alternatives to the program Synergy (keyboard and mouse over network)?

July 1, 2009 10:15 AM

Alternatives to the program Synergy (keyboard and mouse over network)?

When I first got Synergy, I loved it. It was like magic.

But I've left the honeymoon phase and discovered some really frustrating bugs. On my Windows machines, the copy/paste will often by very delayed, or I'll have to move the cursor from A to B to A to B machines to get it to paste. Also the cursor frequently gets "stuck" for a few seconds between machines.

I came to find out that Synergy is not being maintained at all. It's a 3-year old build! WTF?

Can anyone recommend programs that work at least as good as Synergy, preferably those that are open source and multi-platform?

Thanks!

posted by wastelands to computers & internet (8 answers total)

I'm in exactly the same place -- I got fed up with Synergy's freezes yesterday, and found Synergy+, which is a maintenance fork of Synergy. I haven't tried it yet, but hopefully it fixes some of these bugs.
posted by matthewr at 10:21 AM on July 1, 2009 [3 favorites]

matthewr, you rock. Thanks. I will give that a shot.
posted by wastelands at 10:40 AM on July 1, 2009

Stardock has Multiplicity, but works on Windows machines only.
posted by wongcorgi at 10:49 AM on July 1, 2009

You may want to open the app, go into options and put a checkmark next to 'Don't take foreground on windows servers' I was having a lot of freezing caused by Outlook 2007 and this solved my problem completely.
posted by unsurmountable at 10:55 AM on July 1, 2009

Well, Synergy {lus gets an "okay" rating from me. So far I have not encountered my freeze or copy/paste bugs. But I did get a third bug that I used to have on the non-plus version too, where either the ALT or CTRL keys will "stick" for awhile. This is really annoying, e.g. I could not alt-tab for a few minutes just now.

But if I continue to avoid the freeze and the copy/paste bugs, it will be a net gain.
posted by wastelands at 1:13 PM on July 1, 2009

Maxivista
posted by flutable at 1:42 AM on July 2, 2009

In Synergy's defense, I've been using it without hassle for many years in diverse settings.

Are you sure your problems are not network-related?
posted by wfrgms at 1:15 PM on July 2, 2009

There are definitely bugs in Synergy, such as intermittently hanging for a few seconds with the mouse "stuck". Even if the underlying cause is network problems, it shouldn't be doing that.
posted by matthewr at 4:24 AM on July 3, 2009