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Granular clipboard sharing


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I looked around but didn't find this discussed so thought I'd post it here fwiw

I've used Synergy for years and consider it indispensable, and now that I work 100% remotely, I share my keyboard/mouse between:

- my work-provided Mac
- my personal Ubuntu desktop
- my personal Windows laptop (MS Surface)

Synergy lets me keep my personal and work stuff all nice and separate - I can answer personal emails on my Linux/Windows boxes, listen to music, watch movies, etc, while using my Mac strictly for work stuff. It all works great, but I'm running into a sort of an issue: I use clipboard managers on each system - Alfred on the Mac, CopyQ on Linux/Windows - and I have the Synergy clipboard sharing turned on, which is often helpful, I can copy a line of text on one computer and paste it on any of the others. The problem is that when I view my clipboard history in Alfred on my work Mac, it shows all the copied stuff from my personal computers, which is mostly fine, but can be a potential issue in certain cases - like when I'm sharing my Mac screen in a work call and I invoke Alfred to paste a url or something from my history, the call participants can also see the clipboard history from my personal computers - financial stuff, text copied from convos with my wife/family/friends, etc, I never know exactly what's going to show up in there and who's going to see it.

It would be great to have options to control which direction clipboards get copied to, maybe say "between these two computers but not this computer", or maybe filter by keywords or something, or maybe have an option when copying to choose "don't share this" or something. It wouldn't work for every case - sometimes I want to test a url on Microsoft Edge so I copy the url from my Mac and paste it in my Windows laptop, or vice versa, etc. Right now I find myself opening my server config file before a meeting, setting clipboardSharing to "false" and then clearing my Alfred clipboard history, which means everything's fine for the meeting but of course I lose all my Mac clipboard history that way, and it doesn't always apply for every situation.

This is a tall order and I'm not sure what the ideal solution is - wondering if anyone else has run into a similar situation and figured out an ingenious workaround.

tx!

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  • 3 months later...

agreed. minimally, it would be nice to just disable sharing for specific computers.  creating "clipboard families" would be a little more complicated, but it doesn't seem unreasonably so.

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