It says the target is wayland. But which wayland? The set of waylands that support "complex" input device behaviors with libei? Or the set of waylands that hate libei (sway, etc) and will never use it and still plan to roll their own "someday"? And on top of that, will it require libportal with the InputCapture PR? Or xdg-desktop-portal on the other side? I guess what I'm saying is that there's no such thing as "wayland support" for complex input device since "wayland" the standard doesn't support it. There is only support for some subset of the waylands bodge/workarounds.
It's a shame to see each Wayland DE become it's own incompatible thing. Even the lan-mouse readme's OS support table separates them as if they were their own OSes. Good luck in your very complex multi-faceted endeavour.
Developer of lan-mouse here:
I initially started working on this project with only wlroots compositors in mind or more precisely
- any compositor that supports the layer-shell protocol could be used for capturing input
- any compositor that supports wlr-virtual-pointer and virtual-keyboard could be used for input emulation
The main motivation was really to learn more about wayland at that point.
Then later I started to expand the project to support additional backends for e.g. Windows and MacOS (which currently only support input emulation) and of course Libei to get Gnome working as well (and likely KDE in the future).
For input emulation there is also support for the xdg-remote-desktop-portal which seems to be the only option for emulating input on KDE wayland until libei is supported there.
Input Capture using Libei is WIP since the whole project and particularly also the Rust bindings are in a pretty early state right now (thank you so much ids1024 for providing the reis libei bindings, if you are reading this!)
I agree, it's a shame that Wayland is so fragmented among the different DEs. Especially wlr-layer-shell support would be very nice to see on the Gnome Side (it was much easier to work with than libei!...) but I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen.
On the other hand I must also say that supporting wayland through the mentioned interfaces was a more pleasant experience than supporting Xorg with hacks like Xtst (Except for the broken implementation of the remote desktop interface in xdg-desktop-portal-kde maybe, which left me with permanently stuck keys several times...) and I'm still figuring out input capture which is likely also going to rely on more hacks than the wayland side of things.
I have also played with the idea of writing some sort of wlroots -> libei bridge that implements an eis server using the mentioned wlroots specific protocols.
This would reduce the amount of backends required in lan-mouse but add an additional layer of indirection between the application and the compositor, so I'm not sure its such a great idea.
For the foreseeable future, I will definitely keep support for everything within lan-mouse itself.
I still want a way to use multiple mice on the same machine at the same time. With multiple pointers. Focus follows whichever pointer moved last. In the end I want a separate mouse for each of two large monitors. And also makes pair programming easier.
Lan Mouse is a mouse and keyboard sharing software similar to universal-control on Apple devices. It allows for using multiple pcs with a single set of mouse and keyboard. This is also known as a Software KVM switch.
The primary target is Wayland on Linux but Windows and MacOS and Linux on Xorg have partial support as well (see below for more details).
Goal of this project is to be an open-source replacement for proprietary tools like Synergy, Share Mouse.
Focus lies on performance and a clean, manageable implementation that can easily be expanded to support additional backends like e.g. Android, iOS, ... .
Yes, you are right. I probably should have stated that more clearly.
(I did mention input-leap though, which is a fork of synergy 1.x as far as I'm aware)
Is the "blazingly fast" tagline satirical? Like, how would I compare the "fastness" of this implementation? I assume latency? Is Rust as a language choice the predominant minimizer of latency or is the dividing line between systems-level stuff (C, Rust, Cpp) or optimized networking (Go, etc) versus higher level stuff (python, etc).
I am a part-time rust programmer at best, and it was my understanding of the Rust design that it goes something like "Systems programming and memory safety without sacrificing performance" not "automatically faster", unless you compare only to "memory safety without performance guarantees" e.g., Python, JS/CLI, Java, etc. It seems to me that Go lives in this same domain where it intersects networked systems programming.
Yes, it's meant satirical (mostly). Simply because its rust and people say rust is "blazingly fast".
It still is quite fast though I would say (I have not compared it to anything else though).
While moving a 1000Hz polling rate mouse, the cpu usage is about 2% of a single core on my machine (according to htop).
It also uses udp to get the lowest possible latency (which e.g. barrier / input-leap does not afaik).
OK. Thanks for clarifying. That makes sense, sorry for being humorless!
If you're looking to prove seriousness of the speed, I don't think CPU %, polling rate, or UDP-guesstimates are what you want. You probably want RTT measurements, which for I/O with mice via LAN is probably a little wonky to get and I guess will be dominated by network.
You could instrument your code and get latency b/w UI callback / USB poll and the time the packet hits the OS buffer / is written out (and reverse on receiver side). That's kind of the only meaningful metric that matters for I/O code and would ignore network effects, and here CPU time is a hard proxy to use.
Yeah I was planning to do some RTT measurements at some point but have not gotten round to implementing it. Would be great to have that directly in the ui as well!
As you said, I was thinking to get capture->send latency and receive->emulate latency and subtracting that from the RTT to get an estimate of both network and system latency (without the compositing / presentation latency of course which is likely the largest part without some 500hz monitor).
I used to run synergy back in the pentium III days, the trick was to change the windows service priority to real time - once that was done there was no noticeable mouse lag.
I was using windows and a sun box, the windows box had to be the one with the mouse/keyboard connected so ctrl-alt-delete would work.
I've used it and it works pretty well, is written in rust, and it has one big advantage - by emulating the keyboard and mouse at the linux evdev layer it avoids touching any of the desktop-specific apis. (It also has encryption, though over TCP so has issues with managing connections. I think your choice of UDP was a good one)
Definitely going to take a look! I wanted to have the seemless movement to different PCs experience so that's why I can't read events directly from evdev. For emulating it would probably be quite useful! And maybe also in conjunction with the current methods...
udp is supported everywhere and also in the rust standard library as well as tokio.
zmq and nng from what I can tell are both implemented on top of the transportation layer and use tcp under the hood.
Udp also has other advantages besides speed.
- Its session less, so any device going offline can simply come back online without needing to reestablish a tcp handshake.
- The udp header is also substantially smaller than a tcp segment header (8 Bytes vs >= 20 Bytes). Not a huge difference but adds up to at least 12 KiB/s with a packet rate of 1000Hz and that is without the (potential) overhead of additional protocols like zmq or nng on top.
In this particular scenario the reliability of tcp is also not really necessary in my opinion.
I think overall it may be worth investigating if there is a noticeable difference.
Setup requires installing the software on each terminal, plus the keyboard/mouse host computer. After all terminals are connected to host, the keyboard mouse inputs will be transferred to the selected terminal.
All connections are via LAN. The display of the terminals on the host is not included.
Yes, absolutely. I have not gotten round to implementing that but its on the roadmap. The plan is to use https://crates.io/crates/webrtc-dtls.
I dont think timing sidechannel attacks are a huge concern and they could be somewhat mitigated through phantom events.
while i do agree it should not be plaintext, i would likely still use this on my home network where i trust the devices on my network; though if for some reason i did not trust the devices on there, i would use wireguard between two systems as an added layer
I have used Barrier [1] in the past to connect a Windows and Mac machine side-by-side. It's quite powerful, but probably not really as user friendly as the posted solution.
I use it a lot and currently don't recommend it. If one of the computers is a laptop that goes into sleep, when you bring it back out of sleep it will, most of the time, be unable to find the other computer(s) (and will claim they cannot be found) until you exit Mouse without Borders and relaunch it (Edit: on the laptop). At least, that's my experience. I'm about to try switching to Barrier.
Mouse Without Borders has been ubiquitous on all the SEMs I’ve used (where up to three computers can be used together). I’ve never had any problems with it. Now, the SEMs on the other hand…
It's a shame to see each Wayland DE become it's own incompatible thing. Even the lan-mouse readme's OS support table separates them as if they were their own OSes. Good luck in your very complex multi-faceted endeavour.