Lan Mouse

Lan Mouse is a cross-platform mouse and keyboard sharing software similar to universal-control on Apple devices. It allows for using multiple PCs via a single set of mouse and keyboard. This is also known as a Software KVM switch.

Goal of this project is to be an open-source alternative to proprietary tools like Synergy 2/3, Share Mouse and other open source tools like Deskflow or Input Leap (Synergy fork).

Focus lies on performance, ease of use and a maintainable implementation that can be expanded to support additional backends for e.g. Android, iOS, ... in the future.

blazingly fast™ because it's written in rust.

• Now with a gtk frontend

Encryption

Lan Mouse encrypts all network traffic using the DTLS implementation provided by WebRTC.rs. There are currently no mitigations in place for timing side-channel attacks.

OS Support

Most current desktop environments and operating systems are fully supported, this includes

• GNOME >= 45
• KDE Plasma >= 6.1
• Most wlroots based compositors, including Sway (>= 1.8), Hyprland and Wayfire
• Windows
• MacOS

Caveats / Known Issues

[!Important]

• X11 currently only has support for input emulation, i.e. can only be used on the receiving end.

• Sway / wlroots: Wlroots based compositors without libei support on the receiving end currently do not handle modifier events on the client side. This results in CTRL / SHIFT / ALT / SUPER keys not working with a sending device that is NOT using the layer-shell backend

• Wayfire: If you are using Wayfire, make sure to use a recent version (must be newer than October 23rd) and add shortcuts-inhibit to the list of plugins in your wayfire config! Otherwise input capture will not work.

• Windows: The mouse cursor will be invisible when sending input to a Windows system if there is no real mouse connected to the machine.

For more detailed information about os support see Detailed OS Support

Android & IOS

A proof of concept for an Android / IOS Application by rohitsangwan01 can be found here. It can be used as a remote control for any device supported by Lan Mouse.

Installation

Lan Mouse can be installed from the official repositories:

pacman -S lan-mouse

The prerelease version (following main) is available on the AUR:

paru -S lan-mouse-git

• nixpkgs: search.nixos.org
• flake: README.md

After enabling Terra:

dnf install lan-mouse

• Download the package for your Mac (Intel or ARM) from the releases page
• Unzip it
• Remove the quarantine with xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine "Lan Mouse.app"
• Launch the app
• Use the menu bar item to open the settings window or quit Lan Mouse. Bundled macOS builds run as a menu bar app and do not keep a Dock icon visible.
• Grant accessibility permissions in System Preferences

Lan Mouse can be installed from the winget community repositories:

winget install lan-mouse

First make sure to install the necessary dependencies.

Precompiled release binaries for Windows, MacOS and Linux are available in the releases section. For Windows, the depenedencies are included in the .zip file, for other operating systems see Installing Dependencies.

Alternatively, the lan-mouse binary can be compiled from source (see below).

Installing desktop file, app icon and firewall rules (optional)

# install lan-mouse (replace path/to/ with the correct path)
sudo cp path/to/lan-mouse /usr/local/bin/

# install app icon
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps
sudo cp lan-mouse-gtk/resources/de.feschber.LanMouse.svg /usr/local/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps

# update icon cache
gtk-update-icon-cache /usr/local/share/icons/hicolor/

# install desktop entry
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/share/applications
sudo cp de.feschber.LanMouse.desktop /usr/local/share/applications

# when using firewalld: install firewall rule
sudo cp firewall/lan-mouse.xml /etc/firewalld/services
# -> enable the service in firewalld settings

Instead of downloading from the releases, the lan-mouse binary can be easily compiled via cargo or nix:

Compiling and installing manually:

# compile in release mode
cargo build --release

# install lan-mouse
sudo cp target/release/lan-mouse /usr/local/bin/

Compiling and installing via cargo:

# will end up in ~/.cargo/bin
cargo install lan-mouse

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗