Taming Three Laptops With One Mouse and One Keyboard

I have one iMac, one Macbook Pro, and a Windows laptop. Sometimes I feel tired of changing the mouse and keyboard between those three laptops.

Photo by Tarn Nguyen on Unsplash

Of course, you can buy a multi-device mouse and multi-device keyboard, but that will cost you some amount of money. While thinking of a cheaper solution, or if possible, without spending any money, I found the share screen features from Mac.

So, how can we share screen iMac to Macbook (and vice versa)?

First, on the computer you want to enable Share Screen, go to System Preferences and click on the Sharing menu.

Then, click on Remote Management, and add a specific user that is allowed to connect. You can also set the name that will appear on the other computer, in this case, I just use ‘iMac’ for the name.

So, that’s all to enable Remote Management in Mac.

On the other Mac that will connect to the above Mac, go to Finder — Network. You can see iMac on the Network list. Double click on that.

It will show the drive that you can select if you want to. But here we focus on the button ‘Share Screen’. Just click that button.

and tadaa …..

this is how it look when connected to Share Screen on Macbook

Now with this connection, you can type using your keyboard on the first computer (iMac) to type on your second computer (Macbook). And also you can use your mouse from your first computer to click on your second computer.

It is a different story when you want to connect to a Windows laptop. After searching on the internet, I found that it could be done using VNC Server and VNC Viewer.

The first step is you have to install VNC Server on the Windows laptop and make the setting properly. I use the VNC password setting and Standard user in order for the second computer to connect through VNC Viewer. It is not difficult to set the VNC Server in Windows.

On my MacBook, I install the VNC Viewer and look for the computer name I have registered, in this case, KEDI-LAPTOP. Once found, it will be displayed on your VNC Viewer. We just double-click it to connect.

Now, I can also connect to my Windows laptop from my Mac, and use my keyboard and mouse on the Mac to control my Windows laptop. Thus, I have the solution to use one keyboard and one mouse to control all my three laptops, without spending any cent!

Hope this short article will help you. 😀