Show HN: Multi-display screen sharing with CoScreen

Jason Thomas, former CoScreen CTO here.

I am an avid Synergy user, and what they have accomplished in terms of direct mouse/keyboard input synchronization is very impressive, and I use it on a daily basis.

I can say however, it's very different than CoScreen and what CoScreen seeks to achieve, and is performed in a technically different manner.

CoScreen injects mouse interaction and keyboard presses directly into a window on OSX (if it isn't a weird type of window like an emulator, or something that captures and handles input on a very low level).

Synergy simulates mouse movements/events directly over windows, interfering with the position/location and current state of the remote cursor. It's much more like a remote mouse-driver for a lack of a better comparison.

In many ways this is more performant, simpler, and works on a wider variety of windows right out of the box.

On another level it interferes more with remote users, and prevents multi-player collaboration.

I definitely could see us producing a mode that is LAN focussed and which provides synergy like behavior, but the current remote collaboration is really geared from a UX perspective around multi-player in CoScreen.

Zoom became the de-facto screen sharing app and it sucks, so so bad.

Wish I hadn’t missed Coscreen during the lockdown, and now I don’t really have any need for it, but going to keep the link in my back pocket in case it is ever needed. Looks slick. Sort of like x2x but with a thought out interface…

I do this all the time in Zoom, to share PowerPoint presentations at the correct scale and without exposing my speaker notes, and to share YouTube videos from Firefox without showing the "chrome" portion surrounding the video.

My side monitors are oriented vertically, so if I put those windows in fullscreen and try to share the whole monitor it doesn't come out correctly proportioned. This also provides a smoother experience without the "flicker" of going fullscreen and back (which can happen when you switch focus between windows).

It's a similar use-case to the one bentcorner described above.

The "share region" solution is admittedly a bit of a hack but it works. Love to find an easier solution to this scenario (especially a way to break out speaker notes into a floating window I could position right under my webcam).

BTW apropos to nothing, I always loved the way the old Spy++ tool let you drag a reticle onto a control hWnd (reminiscent of how "Select an Element" works in Chrome DevTools) - that was a neat mechanism to quickly select a perfectly carved out region of an app without having to draw a box, but alas these days with so many going Electron, and other non-standard presentation surfaces, it wouldn't be as useful anymore.

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