02 July 2007

Synergy showed me how great OS X is...

This is a followup to my article about switching from Windows to the Mac.

I was playing around with a really cool, open-source product called Synergy. Synergy allows you to use one mouse and keyboard across multiple computers, even computers with different operating systems. I'm using the mouse and keyboard from my Ubuntu box to type this article on my Mac. This kind of setup is very handy for system administrators, since I can have documentation open on one screen and perform commands on the other without a lot of tedious switching back and forth. Synergy even allows them to share a clipboard!

What this has to do with switching to the Mac. Well, Synergy uses the keyboard and mouse settings from the Synergy server, which in my case is Ubuntu Linux. I'm just now noticing some of the subtle features that I now don't have in OS X through Synergy keyboard and mouse emulation. For instance, mouse wheel scrolling acceleration. If you scroll the wheel really slowly in OS X, it only scrolls 1/2 or 1/4 lines, and the faster you scroll the wheel, the more lines it scrolls at a time. I use this all the time, and I only now realized it because it's missing! In Linux, the number of scroll lines is fixed for each scroll, so even if I scroll slowly, it still does the same number of lines as when I scroll quickly.

It's the little things like this that are hard to define when you're using a Mac that make it much nicer to use than pretty much anything else out there.