I got tired of random issues with Synergy and the likes, of nagging about payment, of having two separate configs for taking my laptop to work and back home, about having to port forward for my laptop on VPN at home to talk to my desktop, about oddball Norwegian characters not showing up on an English layout machine, about not being able to have me and my girlfriend's machines both able to control a single big screen machine on the wall without running two instances, and plenty of other gripes.

Hydra is my solution. Now used by a couple of colleagues at work, and available to you on GitHub. It lets you do all of these things and more:

* Runs on MacOS, Linux, and Windows.

* Translates visible characters to Unicode and transmits the character instead of a keycode, letting the target machine figure out how to type that character.

* Switches configurations automatically, based on WiFi SSID, power status, and more, so your laptop can control your other machine at work, yet be controlled by your desktop at home.

* Does end to end encryption with a simple shared secret.

* Keeps your screensaver from activating when input is registered on either machine in the setup.

* Lets you copy files (Mac/Windows only, for now) using ctrl+opt+super+c/v. Images and text sync on the regular clipboard.

* Can run directly by launching the executable, or --install (--uninstall) on Windows and MacOS, which lets it run as a service (and control the Windows lock screen remotely for unlocking)

* Lets you have any number of "master" machines controlling any number of "slave" machines, even fighting over the same one at the same time if you are so inclined.

* It even supports a funky setup with a headless Raspberry Pi that uses a standard PC keyboard, to provide input on a Mac without needing lots of custom setup on the Mac to map the keys correctly.

It also uses a self-hosted, single container, Docker based "hub" called "Styx" to connect machines together, so it can work between a laptop connected to corporate VPN and a desktop, as long as both can reach the hub over SignalR/HTTPS. The hub can also be run on either participant in a local network, if desired, as Hydra embeds Styx as well.

Try it out if you feel like it. A star would be awesome, and if you make a pull request you're an amazing person <3

Low key wild that all the offerings are GPLv2.

Somewhat aside, it'd rock if someone would kindly make a more protocol-first alternative. It'd be nice to be able to have something standard that was easy to implement on our own. I don't even have license dodging in mind, just thinking of weird interesting targets that might be useful to vKVM to/from.