15 ms·

Dynamouse: Mouse driver for Mac studios

123 points by kobieps 3y ago

kobieps 3y ago
macOS multi-mouse & multi-external display assignment for complex screen and peripheral workstations.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dylan604 3y ago
  why would this get flagged when it was a simple description of the TFA
  - joshspankit 3y ago
    Doesn’t add anything significant to the thread
  - Etheryte 3y ago
    HN hopes to foster deep insightful discussion, not a quick TLDR format summary so you can click and move on.
    - kobieps 3y ago
      Noted!
    - yborg 3y ago
      I specifically look for the quick TLDR in the thread since the titles are frequently so non-descriptive of the linked content.
      - kobieps 3y ago
        In my case the /submit form threw me off, haven't used it much and the "text is optional if url is present part" didn't really register. I've probably been conditioned to modern UI which really guides you along i.e. I thought "text" was a required field
mattl 3y ago
This doesn’t seem to just be for the Mac Studio.
- Someone 3y ago
  I think the non-capitalized ‘s’ isn’t a typo. They mean studios using Macs, not people using Mac Studios. FTA: “DynaMouse allows you to assign a specific display to a dedicated mouse device (including the built-in mac trackpads) so that when you have multiple screens in a studio-like/complex workstation setup (and far apart from each other), you don't have to drag your mouse over to the other screen.”
  - kobieps 3y ago
    Thank you, I should have been more descriptive!
- Hamuko 3y ago
  Yeah, as an owner of a Mac Studio with a work MacBook Pro on the side, I was confused as to why my Mac Studio specifically would need mouse drivers. Should've spotted that it was a lowercase S. Personally, I would've probably tried to avoid confusion by wording it a bit differently (like "Mac-based studios" or "Mac-using studios") knowing that there is a product called "Mac Studio".
  - OJFord 3y ago
    Maybe they didn't know there was a product called 'Mac Studio'? I didn't. (Seems to be a cross between the Mac Mini & Pro? Pretty sure used to be just the high-end Mini, not differently named. Or low-end Pro, I seem to remember they suddenly made the Pro a lot more expensive a few years ago.)
    - kobieps 3y ago
      I was playing with words (under the assumption that anyone interested would know what a Mac Studio is, and that this problem regularly comes up in a studio setting where your displays can be far apart.
pimlottc 3y ago
Can you go into some more detail about some use-cases for this? Why would you have multiple screens "far apart from each other"?
- ok_dad 3y ago
  Not a Mac but this illustrates: I have a screen for my simrig (racing wheel and pedals setup almost like a car cockpit) with a wireless keyboard that has a touchpad in it mounted to the rig. On my desk across the room, I have a screen, mouse and keyboard, and the PC that powers that rig. I have to turn one or the other monitor off in order to just use the one mouse next to it on it alone. If this was for Windows also, I would use it to keep the monitors separated with their own input devices. I could imagine several creative workflows that could use setups separated like this, perhaps in a photo studio or a CNC shop.
- jon-wood 3y ago
  My Windows computer is connected to both a monitor on my desk, and a TV way over the other side of the room for playing games that make more sense that way. As the sibling post here mentioned, it can be kind of annoying to pick up the mouse and find the cursor is on the other side of the room.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  Music production is one for sure. Macs are the standard there and each screen usually represents a different "function" and is set up near the device or instrument it relates to. Most people use a macbook or ipad per "station" but for some setups you could run it all off one machine if the inputs were right. There are even workflow advantages to doing it that way. I've heard people wish for this.
- lhamil64 3y ago
  I'm not a Mac user but something like this would be nice for me. I'm visually impaired, and I have to be very close to the screen so I have my main monitor on an arm so it can float above my keyboard. Then I have a second screen (or laptop) on a desk next to me, but to see that I have to turn 90 degrees and lean in, which makes it awkward to use my keyboard/mouse. This is better with a laptop because it gives me a second keyboard/mouse for the second monitor, but I have to keep moving the cursor back and fourth. My solution so far has been to use Autohotkey to define some hotkeys that move my mouse to the center of my main display and the center of my secondary display, which works surprisingly well. Although to be honest, I rarely use the second display. I mainly use it while screen sharing in a meeting so I can have notes and stuff up on my main display.
jitl 3y ago
This is an Electron app, but it never opens a web view; it configures the tray using the native menu bar API. Neat. I wish it was this easy to start with Swift. The SwiftUI API makes the menu stuff almost this easy, but dealing with Xcode projects and Apple Developer program auth stuff always put me off.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- brailsafe 3y ago
  I was also surprised it's a TS project. I will say learning Swift and native macos dev during the last year without a job has been quite fun, and a nice departure from web stuff. Swift's type system is very similar to Typescript, and SwiftUI is somewhat similar to any component UI library, but it has it's own interesting bits. Xcode is a beast, but can be a decent IDE after you get familiarized to the quirks of the language and build process.
  - josephg 3y ago
    I find Xcode so unbelievably unstable for a modern set of developer tools. The last time I was using it to build software, it crashed about once a day, and froze or did weird things regularly. I've also had severe typing lag (!!) and phantom build issues where I build something and it fails with some strange linker error or something, but then doing a clean & rebuild mysteriously fixes everything. And SwiftUI seems great on the surface until you spend time with it and try to actually do anything remotely custom. I spent about a week trying to get a swipe gesture able to push the keyboard out of the way (like you see in Apple Notes and most messaging applications). The web is full of half working hacks that throw up warning messages when the app is running. When things don't work its incredibly difficult figure out whats going on. The documentation is atrocious and the debugging tools are absolute rubbish compared to what you'll find in any modern web browser. Coming back to writing typescript in VS Code or writing rust in Intellij felt like a breath of fresh air compared to working in Xcode. Everything works, and it works fast and reliably. I have good documentation and I can read the code I'm calling if I get confused. I really like Swift as a language and I think Apple has a lot of great ideas there, but developing a swiftui app using apple's developer tooling was a miserable experience. Xcode feels like a cobbled together, buggy mess.
wodenokoto 3y ago
How do I get the scroll wheel on my mouse to scroll “reverse” of my trackpad? I prefer “natural” scrolling on trackpad, but not on my mouse.
- yboris 3y ago
  Scroll Reverser might work: https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/ https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/
  - samatman 3y ago
    This is what I use, it does the job. Flakes out when I plug in occasionally (5% of the time maybe?) but "ope, scroll wheel is backward, time to power-cycle the extension" isn't a crisis.
- nmussy 3y ago
  I haven't been using it for this purpose, but Linear Mouse should be able to do the trick: https://linearmouse.app/ https://linearmouse.app/
  - dharmab 3y ago
    Can confirm LinearMouse makes this easy to set up.
- mey 3y ago
  If you have a Logitech mouse their software can handle that for you in the Mac. Why this isn't supported natively is beyond me
  - ahoka 3y ago
    MacOS is death by a thousand papercuts to use due to these small things that need an app. Installing those apps cause other problems though.
- dylan604 3y ago
deanputney 3y ago
Wow, really neat idea! Even if you're just using two monitors close to each other (a laptop and a monitor for example), I could see scenarios where it would help a ton to have fast access on one or the other.
- iwontberude 3y ago
  Especially with magic track pad, I could imagine this working quite well. You might be able to use both simultaneously with a single hand for some use cases.
alufers 3y ago
Does it work for touchscreens too? When I plug in a portable monitor with a touchscreen into my macOS laptop the touch input gets sent into the screen where the cursor is (ie. I touch the touchscreen but it clicks something on the internal display, because this is where I left the cursor), instead of always inputting on the physical monitor associated with this touchscreen.
deafpolygon 3y ago
This seems to be very useful, but can anyone illustrate what the use cases are? In my own uses, it would have limited value since I can do 98% of what I need to do with a single mouse.
- lvturner 3y ago
  Two player Lemmings[0] (came in to the comments to find an Amiga reference, didn't find one, so leaving my own) [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chv49bHtLUY&t=256s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chv49bHtLUY&t=256s
  - yencabulator 3y ago
    I don't think this hack makes macOS actually have to pointers, it just teleports the pointer to the screen associated with the input device you're using.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
no_time 3y ago
So is this basically hacking in multiseat support for an OS that doesn't have it? Fascinating stuff.
- yencabulator 3y ago
  It doesn't sound like true multiseat, they're still the same session, there's only one focused window, etc.
- callalex 3y ago
  Interestingly enough, macOS is multi-seat. You can start a desktop environment as different users over VNC without interrupting the physical user of the machine.
pzmarzly 3y ago
What happens when you put 2 cursors over the same app, and the app checks for cursor position (e.g. video games, on-hover UI)? Will it get one of 2 cursors? Or will it see nothing, and then when you click something, the cursor will "teleport" to the place where you clicked? Or does it use some magic multitouch macOS API? If anyone has installed this project and wants to check this, here is a test page that can help: https://codepen.io/ahmedbnabouelezz/pen/wvWZWjO https://codepen.io/ahmedbnabouelezz/pen/wvWZWjO
- OJFord 3y ago
  I think surely it 'teleports' - the one activating hovers is presumably the last moved; I think others must be dummy placeholders as it were, not actually independent simultaneously usable cursors.
- Thorrez 3y ago
  Will there be 2 cursors at the same time? The way I read the GitHub page, I thought there would only ever be 1 cursor at a time. When you switch mice, I thought the cursor would teleport to the other monitor, to the place where it was last used on that other monitor.
jonwinstanley 3y ago
Bravo, building this must not have been easy
- ramses0 3y ago
  I think it's relatively straightforward? Each mouse should be generating input events, it's "just" a matter of "Mouse1 += (100x, 200y)", "Mouse2 += (-3x, -5y)" and keeping track of a virtual cursor/pointer position that the "real" cursor should jump to depending on which mouse is generating input events. ...and for the use cases, having an extended desktop (eg: airplay to HDTV mounted on the wall) and being able to have your primary "desktop" mouse 100% glued to your main screen, but a secondary "click the play next video button on the tv" mouse is genius! I'm pretty sure if somebody were sufficiently innovative they could paint a bullseye/target around the virtual cursors with some sort of minor performance penalty (a-la: xNeko - https://github.com/crgimenes/neko https://github.com/crgimenes/neko).
thatxliner 3y ago
Isn’t this just Universal Control?
gwbas1c 3y ago
Why not use two computers?
rekabis 3y ago
When all current operating systems make the fundamental assumption of only one application window having “focus” at one time (even down to individual application elements having exclusive focus), how does having multiple cursors do anything other than massively cock-block everyone in control of a cursor? I can see this as being nothing more than a Battle Royale for control of whatever UI element you are trying to interact with, while fighting off the control that other users want to have of other UI elements that they are trying to interact with. In other words, a massively shitty hairball where everyone gets frustrated to the point of rage-quitting. Edit: just try using a remote-access/remote-support software, like RustDesk, where each user (when more than one have access to a desktop) get their own cursor (even if you can’t see the other person’s cursor). You end up walking on eggshells trying to avoid the other person’s application/UI focus.

123 points by kobieps 3y ago

kobieps 3y ago

macOS multi-mouse & multi-external display assignment for complex screen and peripheral workstations.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dylan604 3y ago
why would this get flagged when it was a simple description of the TFA
- joshspankit 3y ago
  Doesn’t add anything significant to the thread
- Etheryte 3y ago
  HN hopes to foster deep insightful discussion, not a quick TLDR format summary so you can click and move on.
  - kobieps 3y ago
    Noted!
  - yborg 3y ago
    I specifically look for the quick TLDR in the thread since the titles are frequently so non-descriptive of the linked content.
    - kobieps 3y ago
      In my case the /submit form threw me off, haven't used it much and the "text is optional if url is present part" didn't really register. I've probably been conditioned to modern UI which really guides you along i.e. I thought "text" was a required field

mattl 3y ago

This doesn’t seem to just be for the Mac Studio.

Someone 3y ago
I think the non-capitalized ‘s’ isn’t a typo. They mean studios using Macs, not people using Mac Studios. FTA: “DynaMouse allows you to assign a specific display to a dedicated mouse device (including the built-in mac trackpads) so that when you have multiple screens in a studio-like/complex workstation setup (and far apart from each other), you don't have to drag your mouse over to the other screen.”
- kobieps 3y ago
  Thank you, I should have been more descriptive!
Hamuko 3y ago
Yeah, as an owner of a Mac Studio with a work MacBook Pro on the side, I was confused as to why my Mac Studio specifically would need mouse drivers. Should've spotted that it was a lowercase S. Personally, I would've probably tried to avoid confusion by wording it a bit differently (like "Mac-based studios" or "Mac-using studios") knowing that there is a product called "Mac Studio".
- OJFord 3y ago
  Maybe they didn't know there was a product called 'Mac Studio'? I didn't. (Seems to be a cross between the Mac Mini & Pro? Pretty sure used to be just the high-end Mini, not differently named. Or low-end Pro, I seem to remember they suddenly made the Pro a lot more expensive a few years ago.)
  - kobieps 3y ago
    I was playing with words (under the assumption that anyone interested would know what a Mac Studio is, and that this problem regularly comes up in a studio setting where your displays can be far apart.

pimlottc 3y ago

Can you go into some more detail about some use-cases for this? Why would you have multiple screens "far apart from each other"?

ok_dad 3y ago
Not a Mac but this illustrates: I have a screen for my simrig (racing wheel and pedals setup almost like a car cockpit) with a wireless keyboard that has a touchpad in it mounted to the rig. On my desk across the room, I have a screen, mouse and keyboard, and the PC that powers that rig. I have to turn one or the other monitor off in order to just use the one mouse next to it on it alone. If this was for Windows also, I would use it to keep the monitors separated with their own input devices. I could imagine several creative workflows that could use setups separated like this, perhaps in a photo studio or a CNC shop.
jon-wood 3y ago
My Windows computer is connected to both a monitor on my desk, and a TV way over the other side of the room for playing games that make more sense that way. As the sibling post here mentioned, it can be kind of annoying to pick up the mouse and find the cursor is on the other side of the room.
giraffe_lady 3y ago
Music production is one for sure. Macs are the standard there and each screen usually represents a different "function" and is set up near the device or instrument it relates to. Most people use a macbook or ipad per "station" but for some setups you could run it all off one machine if the inputs were right. There are even workflow advantages to doing it that way. I've heard people wish for this.
lhamil64 3y ago
I'm not a Mac user but something like this would be nice for me. I'm visually impaired, and I have to be very close to the screen so I have my main monitor on an arm so it can float above my keyboard. Then I have a second screen (or laptop) on a desk next to me, but to see that I have to turn 90 degrees and lean in, which makes it awkward to use my keyboard/mouse. This is better with a laptop because it gives me a second keyboard/mouse for the second monitor, but I have to keep moving the cursor back and fourth. My solution so far has been to use Autohotkey to define some hotkeys that move my mouse to the center of my main display and the center of my secondary display, which works surprisingly well. Although to be honest, I rarely use the second display. I mainly use it while screen sharing in a meeting so I can have notes and stuff up on my main display.

jitl 3y ago

This is an Electron app, but it never opens a web view; it configures the tray using the native menu bar API. Neat. I wish it was this easy to start with Swift. The SwiftUI API makes the menu stuff almost this easy, but dealing with Xcode projects and Apple Developer program auth stuff always put me off.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
brailsafe 3y ago
I was also surprised it's a TS project. I will say learning Swift and native macos dev during the last year without a job has been quite fun, and a nice departure from web stuff. Swift's type system is very similar to Typescript, and SwiftUI is somewhat similar to any component UI library, but it has it's own interesting bits. Xcode is a beast, but can be a decent IDE after you get familiarized to the quirks of the language and build process.
- josephg 3y ago
  I find Xcode so unbelievably unstable for a modern set of developer tools. The last time I was using it to build software, it crashed about once a day, and froze or did weird things regularly. I've also had severe typing lag (!!) and phantom build issues where I build something and it fails with some strange linker error or something, but then doing a clean & rebuild mysteriously fixes everything. And SwiftUI seems great on the surface until you spend time with it and try to actually do anything remotely custom. I spent about a week trying to get a swipe gesture able to push the keyboard out of the way (like you see in Apple Notes and most messaging applications). The web is full of half working hacks that throw up warning messages when the app is running. When things don't work its incredibly difficult figure out whats going on. The documentation is atrocious and the debugging tools are absolute rubbish compared to what you'll find in any modern web browser. Coming back to writing typescript in VS Code or writing rust in Intellij felt like a breath of fresh air compared to working in Xcode. Everything works, and it works fast and reliably. I have good documentation and I can read the code I'm calling if I get confused. I really like Swift as a language and I think Apple has a lot of great ideas there, but developing a swiftui app using apple's developer tooling was a miserable experience. Xcode feels like a cobbled together, buggy mess.

wodenokoto 3y ago

How do I get the scroll wheel on my mouse to scroll “reverse” of my trackpad? I prefer “natural” scrolling on trackpad, but not on my mouse.

yboris 3y ago
Scroll Reverser might work: https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/ https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/
- samatman 3y ago
  This is what I use, it does the job. Flakes out when I plug in occasionally (5% of the time maybe?) but "ope, scroll wheel is backward, time to power-cycle the extension" isn't a crisis.
nmussy 3y ago
I haven't been using it for this purpose, but Linear Mouse should be able to do the trick: https://linearmouse.app/ https://linearmouse.app/
- dharmab 3y ago
  Can confirm LinearMouse makes this easy to set up.
mey 3y ago
If you have a Logitech mouse their software can handle that for you in the Mac. Why this isn't supported natively is beyond me
- ahoka 3y ago
  MacOS is death by a thousand papercuts to use due to these small things that need an app. Installing those apps cause other problems though.
dylan604 3y ago

deanputney 3y ago

Wow, really neat idea! Even if you're just using two monitors close to each other (a laptop and a monitor for example), I could see scenarios where it would help a ton to have fast access on one or the other.

iwontberude 3y ago
Especially with magic track pad, I could imagine this working quite well. You might be able to use both simultaneously with a single hand for some use cases.

alufers 3y ago

Does it work for touchscreens too? When I plug in a portable monitor with a touchscreen into my macOS laptop the touch input gets sent into the screen where the cursor is (ie. I touch the touchscreen but it clicks something on the internal display, because this is where I left the cursor), instead of always inputting on the physical monitor associated with this touchscreen.

deafpolygon 3y ago

This seems to be very useful, but can anyone illustrate what the use cases are? In my own uses, it would have limited value since I can do 98% of what I need to do with a single mouse.

lvturner 3y ago
Two player Lemmings[0] (came in to the comments to find an Amiga reference, didn't find one, so leaving my own) [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chv49bHtLUY&t=256s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chv49bHtLUY&t=256s
- yencabulator 3y ago
  I don't think this hack makes macOS actually have to pointers, it just teleports the pointer to the screen associated with the input device you're using.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

no_time 3y ago

So is this basically hacking in multiseat support for an OS that doesn't have it? Fascinating stuff.

yencabulator 3y ago
It doesn't sound like true multiseat, they're still the same session, there's only one focused window, etc.
callalex 3y ago
Interestingly enough, macOS is multi-seat. You can start a desktop environment as different users over VNC without interrupting the physical user of the machine.

pzmarzly 3y ago

What happens when you put 2 cursors over the same app, and the app checks for cursor position (e.g. video games, on-hover UI)? Will it get one of 2 cursors? Or will it see nothing, and then when you click something, the cursor will "teleport" to the place where you clicked? Or does it use some magic multitouch macOS API? If anyone has installed this project and wants to check this, here is a test page that can help: https://codepen.io/ahmedbnabouelezz/pen/wvWZWjO https://codepen.io/ahmedbnabouelezz/pen/wvWZWjO

OJFord 3y ago
I think surely it 'teleports' - the one activating hovers is presumably the last moved; I think others must be dummy placeholders as it were, not actually independent simultaneously usable cursors.
Thorrez 3y ago
Will there be 2 cursors at the same time? The way I read the GitHub page, I thought there would only ever be 1 cursor at a time. When you switch mice, I thought the cursor would teleport to the other monitor, to the place where it was last used on that other monitor.

jonwinstanley 3y ago

Bravo, building this must not have been easy

ramses0 3y ago
I think it's relatively straightforward? Each mouse should be generating input events, it's "just" a matter of "Mouse1 += (100x, 200y)", "Mouse2 += (-3x, -5y)" and keeping track of a virtual cursor/pointer position that the "real" cursor should jump to depending on which mouse is generating input events. ...and for the use cases, having an extended desktop (eg: airplay to HDTV mounted on the wall) and being able to have your primary "desktop" mouse 100% glued to your main screen, but a secondary "click the play next video button on the tv" mouse is genius! I'm pretty sure if somebody were sufficiently innovative they could paint a bullseye/target around the virtual cursors with some sort of minor performance penalty (a-la: xNeko - https://github.com/crgimenes/neko https://github.com/crgimenes/neko).

thatxliner 3y ago

Isn’t this just Universal Control?

gwbas1c 3y ago

Why not use two computers?

rekabis 3y ago

When all current operating systems make the fundamental assumption of only one application window having “focus” at one time (even down to individual application elements having exclusive focus), how does having multiple cursors do anything other than massively cock-block everyone in control of a cursor? I can see this as being nothing more than a Battle Royale for control of whatever UI element you are trying to interact with, while fighting off the control that other users want to have of other UI elements that they are trying to interact with. In other words, a massively shitty hairball where everyone gets frustrated to the point of rage-quitting. Edit: just try using a remote-access/remote-support software, like RustDesk, where each user (when more than one have access to a desktop) get their own cursor (even if you can’t see the other person’s cursor). You end up walking on eggshells trying to avoid the other person’s application/UI focus.