Bye Bye Synergy, Hello Input Director!

There are numerous websites and blogs out there that highlight Synergy while linking to my site and the pictures of my home office as an example. I am happy that I’ve been able to point out this incredibly useful software keyboard/mouse switch but the time has come to start pointing out the utility that is eclipsing Synergy and that tool is called Input Director. Development of Synergy has been on a long hiatus since April 2006 and there’s no sign of a new version. Combined with my experiences where Synergy randomly stops working when a Windows 7 slave system is part of the configuration has led me to give Input Director a try.

If you want the short version of this post I’ll summarize; Input Director does most of what Synergy does, and a lot more. I’ve run both side by side for a while and have completely switched over to Input Director now. Synergy has been a faithful utility that I couldn’t have done without and thanks goes out to Chris for creating it in the first place.

One of the features of Input Director that I really like is that the layout of the screens and systems can be changed on the fly in the Master Configuration panel. With Synergy I often had to switch to a pre-configured file since I change layouts quite a lot when I’m working on different things at different times. By simply dragging around the visual location of the screens in the configuration panel I can make changes much faster and without any hassle. And I haven’t experienced any of the problems with Windows 7 either, which is, of course, a huge plus for Input Director.

In addition to that, slaves can be configured so they allow themselves to be taken over by any system or by system name, or IP and subnet. Because my “master” system is interchangeable it comes as no surprise that this is something I’m quite happy with. No more fiddling with, or swapping out, configuration files on the master and using a network based script control that stops/starts Synergy remotely while making changes to the registry of the remote systems to update the name of the master system they should listen to.

Another great advantage is that Input Director will run as a Windows Service on Vista and Windows 7 (with Synergy you’d have to use the “start at login” instead of “start at startup”) and slaves are immediately available at the logon screen.

One of the other things I had gotten annoyed about with Synergy is that it doesn’t play nice with my Wacom Intuos 4 tablet. When using it in absolute mode and hitting the top edge of a screen it would try and take control over the remote system at that edge and unfortunately would lock up the mouse cursor on the remote system. Again, this required me to use a different pre-configured file for the Synergy master system. With Input Director there’s an option to temporarily turn off transitions. You can get to it from the tray icon menu or assign hotkeys. That’s the way I like it!

There are some more complex configuration options for setting screen edge percentages in Synergy that aren’t supported by Input Director (at this time) which I did use to ensure that transitions would not occur along certain portions of the edges of screens but after having moved to Input Director and its option to not allow transitions near the corners I found that it didn’t take me long to get used to this. I no longer miss this particular configuration feature that Synergy has.

I recommend you have a look at Input Director and check out the plethora of other useful features it offers. I could go on and on about it but I figure that if it works for me and my elaborate multi monitor setup then it should work for almost everyone else as well. Shane Richards, the developer of Input Director, has done an amazing job.

Oh, I may have forgotten to mention, it’s free. So what are you waiting for?