If you have multiple machines in the same workspace, you probably use a KVM to manage them -- or maybe you even have multiple keyboards and mice. There's a better way! Synergy lets you share a single keyboard and mouse between multiple networked machines. It's even cross-platform!

Do you have multiple computers on your desk? Is one of them a laptop that is sat off to the side a bit? Have you ever wished that you could get rid of all but one of the keyboard / mouse combos that clutter your desk or that your laptop was easier to control? If so then Synergy is the answer to your woes.

Not to be confuse with the latest boardroom buzz word, synergy is a nice little application that allows the sharing of keyboard and mouse services between up to 4 physical boxes. Synergy lets you use one keyboard and mouse across multiple computers. To do so it requires that all the computers are connected to each other via TCP/IP networking.

Synergy is an open source project that allows you to share a keyboard and a mouse among several different computers, each connected to some sort of monitor, without any extra hardware (i.e. KVM switches). Synergy runs over the network and can be used with several different operating systems.

If you have multiple computers on your desktop you can share the keyboard and mouse between systems using x2x.

we’re going to show you how to share keyboard, mouse, and video (click for short demonstration) between multiple desktop computers, using different Operating Systems with a free Open Source program called Synergy2.

Developer Chris Ball has patched the Vino Virtual Network Computing (VNC) server to display multiple simultaneous mouse and keyboard events. The result could be an end to the battle over mouse and keyboard control among local and remote users in a VNC environment.

QuickSynergy is a GUI frontend to the command-line program, Synergy. This little app combo is fantastic -- it allows a user to control multiple computers with a single mouse and keyboard, allowing copy/paste from one computer to the other, and it functions with many different operating systems, including Linux, Mac/BSD, and Windows systems.

Because I’m constantly doing things on both machines, I’m always switching between my regular keyboard for my desktop machine and my laptop’s keyboard, and likewise with the two mice. Synergy eliminates that switching.