If you have issues configuring or installing Synergy, try the following steps.
- Make sure you install Synergy on all the computers you will use.
- Check the download page to make sure you're running the latest version of Synergy on all of your computers (you can see which version you have installed by clicking Help (on Windows) or Synergy (on macOS), and then About Synergy).
- Choose which computer's keyboard and mouse you will use and configure that on the main configuration window (click Use this computer's keyboard and mouse on the left).
- Click the Configure Server button on the server computer and add the client computers in to the grid on the Server Configuration screen and place the computers so that the sides are directly connected along the edge of another computer.
- Note: You only need to add a client computer once, even if you have multiple monitors, because Synergy will treat all screens on one computer as "one big screen".
- In the Server Configuration screen, double-click on each computer to change the Screen name. This needs to match the client name that you gave.
- Note: The names entered should not contain spaces (neither in the middle, beginning, the end of the name). Please also check that you are only using UTF-8 characters (see below).
- After making any change on the server or the client, always click Apply.
- If you're getting a Connection failed error, try doing a ping test to make sure your computers can communicate over the LAN connection.
Gotchas & known bugs
This is definitely not an exhaustive list, but here are some of the common issues that users have problems with (we do plan to fix these).
Client name change
If you change the screen name in the Preferences window, you need to exit and open Synergy again for it to take effect. Unfortunately this is a known bug.
Non UTF-8 characters
Unfortunately, Synergy doesn't support non UTF-8 characters in path names yet. So, if you're using Windows and your Windows user name has special non UTF-8 characters in it, e.g. ÜsérNäme, then this is likely to give you an error.
To workaround this, save the configuration file to a different path, for example: ~code~C:\Synergy\Synergy.conf~/code~
Read more: Troubleshooting for user ID with non UTF-8 characters
If this article didn't help, you can talk to someone on our support team (unless we sent you here, in which case please reply via the ticket you already have open).