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<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN">
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<html>
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<head>
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<meta HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html;CHARSET=iso-8859-1">
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<meta name="keywords" content="Virtual Screen, Open Source, Software" />
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<meta name="description" content="Mouse and Keyboard Sharing" />
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="synergy.css" media="screen" />
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<title>Synergy Developer Documentation</title>
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</head>
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<body class="main">
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<p>
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Synergy is reasonably well commented so reading the source code
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should be enough to understand particular pieces. See the
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<span class="code">doc/PORTING</span>
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file in the synergy source code for more high-level information.
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</p><p>
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</p><h4>How it works</h4><p>
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</p><p>
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The theory behind synergy is simple: the server captures mouse,
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keyboard, clipboard, and screen saver events and forwards them to
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one or more clients. If input is directed to the server itself
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then the input is delivered normally. In practice, however, many
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complications arise.
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</p><p>
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First, different keyboard mappings can produce different characters.
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Synergy attempts to generate the same character on the client as
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would've been generated on the server, including appropriate modifier
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keys (like Control and Alt). Non-character keys like Shift are also
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synthesized if possible. Sometimes the client simply cannot create
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the character or doesn't have a corresponding non-character key and
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synergy must discard the event. Note that synergy won't necessarily
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synthesize an event for the corresponding key on the client's
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keyboard. For example, if the client or server can't distinguish
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between the left and right shift keys then synergy can't be certain
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to synthesize the shift on the same side of the keyboard as the user
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pressed.
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</p><p>
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Second, different systems have different clipboards and clipboard
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formats. The X window system has a system-wide selection and
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clipboard (and yet other buffers) while Microsoft Windows has only
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a system-wide clipboard. Synergy has to choose which of these
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buffers correspond to one another. Furthermore, different systems
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use different text encodings and line breaks. Synergy mediates and
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converts between them.
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</p><p>
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Finally, there are no standards across operating systems for some
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operations that synergy requires. Among these are: intercepting
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and synthesizing events; enabling, disabling, starting and stopping
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the screen saver; detecting when the screen saver starts; reading
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and writing the clipboard(s).
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</p><p>
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All this means that synergy must be customized to each operating
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system (or windowing system in the case of X windows). Synergy
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breaks platform differences into two groups. The first includes
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the mundane platform dependent things: file system stuff,
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multithreading, network I/O, multi-byte and wide character
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conversion, time and sleeping, message display and logging, and
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running a process detached from a terminal. This code lives in
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<span class="code">lib/arch</span>.
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</p><p>
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The second includes screen and window management handling, user
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event handling, event synthesis, the clipboards, and the screen
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saver. This code lives in <span class="code">lib/platform</span>.
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</p><p>
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For both groups, there are particular classes or interfaces that
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must be inherited and implemented for each platform. See the
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<span class="code">doc/PORTING</span> file in the synergy source
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code for more information.
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</p><p>
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</p><h4>Auto-generated Documentation</h4><p>
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</p><p>
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Synergy can automatically generate documentation from the comments
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in the code using <a target="_top" href="http://www.doxygen.org/">doxygen</a>.
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Use <span class="command">make doxygen</span> to build it yourself
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from the source code into the <span class="code">doc/doxygen/html</span>
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directory.
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</p>
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</p>
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</body>
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</html>
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