Feature request #1456: Set a key command to toggle Synergy > iTunes hot-key control?

Comments

1. Greg Hurrell 2010-01-04T10:56:04Z

   Unfortunately not, because of the "chicken and egg" problem.

   As you note, you can set a hot key to quit Synergy. Synergy will listen for hot key presses and quit itself when you press the right key combination.

   But if you want a hot key to start Synergy, who or what will be listening for that hot key press? Synergy itself obviously can't listen because it's not running at that point.

   The only way around this problem would be to introduce a separate process which listens just for that key press, and launches Synergy when required. But then we're back where started: instead of leaving Synergy running all the time, we now have an invisible background process running all the time.

   For Synergy Advance I actually did implement such an invisible background process, but there doesn't seem to be any point in Synergy because it already is a lightweight background process. Note that you can also make it quite unobtrusive by hiding the menu bar buttons (there's a hot key for that) or for setting it to only show itself when iTunes is running.

   So for now I don't really see a way to give you what you are asking for without doing something that doesn't make a lot of sense. So I'm going to mark this one as closed for now, but feel free to add more comments if you have questions or other points to make.

2. Greg Hurrell 2010-01-04T10:59:06Z

   Ah, one more thing I forgot to add before I close this. If you want a really quick way to launch Synergy without having to open the preferences you could create an alias to the actual application file. Just say you installed into /Applications, the actual executable is stored at /Applications/Synergy Preferences.app/Contents/Resources/Synergy.prefPane/Contents/Resources/Synergy.app. To actually get to that you need to right-click and do a "Show package contents" to look inside the bundles.

   But once you expose the actual executable you can just right-click on it, choose "Create alias", and then drag that alias wherever you want for convenient access.

3. Greg Hurrell 2010-01-04T11:00:58Z

   See ticket #1457 for one possible enhancement that would make Synergy easier to launch.

4. Greg Hurrell 2010-01-04T11:01:02Z

   Status changed:

   • From: new
   • To: closed

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