So a friend of mine let me know about this sweet application: synergy. It’s supported on all the major platforms, works over the net (LAN would be suggested). If you set up ssh portforwarding you could make it secure, but i’m serving on a windows machine and i’m only using it locally. Anyhow, the app allows you to share your mouse and keyboard (and optionally clipboard depending) across any machine. it’s more or less a snap to setup, windows has a dialog based configurator. OSX and linux have a simple text config file (which is normal for those platforms).

I am somewhat curious as to why configurations must be mirrored across machines, maybe just to reduce the overhead of announcing it from the server. Perhaps i’ll look into it, or better yet, port the configurator to cocoa, wouldn’t that be nifty? The software is available as a binary for OSX, but i opted to install it via port (which has the latest version). If you have a few machines sitting at a desk and don’t want to use a full blown vnc system, this really simplifies usage.