What needs to happen to see better support for Teleport?

[ylluminate]

Teleport is a fantastic little tool that beats the pants off of Synergy. Do we need to establish a shareware / donation / commercial model for Teleport in order to see it start getting better support and more development?

[nbolton]

I think we'd need to have a website saying why Teleport is better than Synergy (and ShareMouse, and Input Director, and Mouse without Borders, and Multiplicity...)

[ylluminate]

That should be pretty straight forward; I don't have a lot of experience with anything other than Synergy, but the thing that really sets Teleport apart is how it seems to lend a more cohesive experience to sharing between two Mac systems. The initial configuration is much more intuitive; the dragging and dropping of files between systems is seamless; and the sharing of the pasteboard has been markedly more reliable and robust than what I have had with Synergy. If one's goal is to have two (or more) Macs sitting beside each other, Teleport seems to be the winner.

Frankly I'd like to see an active project (like @nbolton's acquisition of Synergy) take the reigns over for Teleport since we just don't see enough updates to address some of the current problems.

At the end of the day, I'd love to see a 100% cohesive experience between two Macs. It would be nice if Teleport would even handle file sharing in such a way as to automate sharing of filesystems so that things become even more cohesive. Heck, synchronizing application (only) preferences would also be remarkable and then having an option to exclude certain apps from pref sync'ing. Obviously my remarks have veered off on a tangent here, but I could see a value proposition in a commercial Teleport with such a push; one that homogenizes the experience. My use-case is where I have one system with multiple monitors for mundane tasks such as email, browsing, document writing, etc. and then another system with multiple monitors right beside this for video, photo, audio, etc. editing and I flip between the two for software development and try to keep my dev environment cohesive as well as the occasional video editing / screen casting that I'll do on my "mundane" workstation. Nothing really has made this experience pleasant or cohesive enough at this point.

[dmitshur]

A key thing to keep in mind is that Teleport supports macOS only. So it's only applicable for multiple Macs. Synergy and similar tools work (but nowhere near as well) under macOS, Linux, Windows.

[nbolton]

@ylluminate Excellent comment! 👍

[ylluminate]

One other thing that I think would be important on a professional level for both teleport and synergy would be a pro offering that gives an extremely low latency / high priority input so that when doing things like editing in something like Photoshop or Cinema 4D or FCPX, etc. it would guarantee a certain response threshold that pros will appreciate. The lag is sometimes difficult to deal with and scrolling is not as smooth at times as it should be. This would be much more valuable than encryption, for example, at a pro usage level.

[mrnebbi]

I have licenses for Synergy. But I still seem to only ever use Teleport. It's almost seamless. I would be willing to pay for updates like other software, or donate if it helps development.

[nbolton]

@ianisted If you need help with Synergy, please let me know. My life's work is to make sure Synergy is absolutely seamless. If it's not, then you should give me hell! I'm serious.

[mrnebbi]

@nbolton well I've been using Teleport for years. I switched to Synergy as the ability to use it with other operating systems seemed like a good idea. There was also a period where Teleport wasn't getting much love.

After switching the feature I missed the most, was one of the simplest. The ability to have a key to allow the transition between two machines is invaluable to me. Having my mouse switch to my other machine when I happen to move a little too far left is very frustrating. I ended up switching back to Teleport to get back this ability.

[mrnebbi]

@nbolton I will say this. Synergy is certainly faster, and more stable. And my comment about teleport being almost seamless was not to imply that Synergy isn't.

[mrnebbi]

@nbolton one other thing I frequently use is CTRL+Scroll (Mac OS) to zoom into the screen. This works with Teleport, but not with Synergy :(

[mrnebbi]

@nbolton in fact, it seems to not be sending the CTRL modifier. I can't use any shortcuts I have setup to include CTRL.

[mrnebbi]

@nbolton also, if I'm zoomed in on screen, and accidentally bump to the second screen, I can't get my cursor back. It pins itself to the top left of the second screen. I have to use the other keyboard and mouse to stop the service, zoom out, then start the service again.

[mrnebbi]

@nbolton sorry. Not wanting to bombard you, but switched back to Synergy this morning. These are issues I've encountered over the last couple of hours.

[nbolton]

@ianisted Thank you so much for the feedback! Sounds like you found a bug, I hope you don't mind but I opened a ticket for you with our customer support team. They may have a hotfix or workaround for you :)

[mrnebbi]

@nbolton not a problem at all. I'm afraid it also doesn't send the Shift key when in Parallels. I can use Shift to use capital letters and symbols in the Mac OS host environment, but in the VM it sends all keys without shift. Local keyboard, and Teleport send the Shift key as expected, so it's not a VM issue.

[ylluminate]

@ianisted I'm in the same boat.

I just haven't been able to get Synergy to work as seamless as Teleport. It's the little things that have really made the difference. It "just works" with VMs like Parallels on the remote machine; scrolling is smooth; I can set the boundary so that the cursor goes in at the right spot (I've fought like a nut with Synergy over this).

I eventually just gave up on Synergy and chalked my license up to life learning. Until Synergy has the level of UI and customization that Teleport has, it just won't float. Frankly, it would be good for a Synergy dev to go to a backroom for 6 months and just reimplement Teleport as a universal system with the Synergy codebase.

They should get 4 Mac computers (2 running Teleport; 2 running Synergy; hackintoshes will work) with multiple heads each (more than 2 would be wiser to catch problems) and then just start testing and implementing until feature parity is 1-1. That would make Synergy killer @nbolton. I gave up reporting and testing Synergy because I don't have the bandwidth to just keep trying to test and report things when I really need to get work done and the bug fixing experience I had before was a little burdensome (I don't want to get into reasons as I don't want to hurt any feelings).

[macgeneral]

I gave up on Synergy a long time ago - it took them more than two years to get keymappings between non-us layouts right and it's still far from Teleport. And one thing I love about Teleport is that it can act as Server and Client at the same time: so if I use the keyboard on the MacBook Pro by accident (instead of the iMacs shared one) I don't even notice that I use the 'wrong' device ;)

• drag & drop of files
• flawless clipboard sharing
• faster / better cpu usage and less lags/delays

I regret buying Synergy more than 2 years ago, I was hoping that buying a license would support them in fixing that awful keyboard mapping bug and Teleport seemed to be partial dead/unmaintained back then. But instead they rolled out Some unimportant features while the basics still didn't work.

[nbolton]

@ylluminate @macgeneral I raised tickets for you both. I really appreciate your feedback! Our refund policy is a normally a full refund within 30 days if you're in any way unhappy, but both in your cases I'm happy to refund you even though you've been with us for years. I still hope we can get it working for you even with a refund (you'll still have access to the download of course).

[somefool]

So is it ACTUALLY possible to get teleport running with Sierra?

[johndbritton]

The latest release v1.2.2 is working on macOS Big Sur. Give it a try, if you have any problems please open an issue with full steps to reproduce.

@ylluminate @dmitshur @mrnebbi @macgeneral I'm going to do what I can to make sure the main features of Teleport are working well. If you're able and willing to contribute please do. Happy to review pull requests that improve it.