Dynamouse: Mouse driver for Mac studios

https://github.com/projectstorm/dynamouse

by kobieps • 2 years ago

123 64 2 years ago

github.com

kobieps5• 2 years ago

macOS multi-mouse & multi-external display assignment for complex screen and peripheral workstations.

dylan6042• 2 years ago

why would this get flagged when it was a simple description of the TFA

joshspankit• 2 years ago

Doesn’t add anything significant to the thread

Etheryte• 2 years ago

HN hopes to foster deep insightful discussion, not a quick TLDR format summary so you can click and move on.

mattl• 2 years ago

This doesn’t seem to just be for the Mac Studio.

Someone• 2 years ago

I think the non-capitalized ‘s’ isn’t a typo. They mean studios using Macs, not people using Mac Studios.

FTA: “DynaMouse allows you to assign a specific display to a dedicated mouse device (including the built-in mac trackpads) so that when you have multiple screens in a studio-like/complex workstation setup (and far apart from each other), you don't have to drag your mouse over to the other screen.”

kobieps5• 2 years ago

Thank you, I should have been more descriptive!

Hamuko• 2 years ago

Yeah, as an owner of a Mac Studio with a work MacBook Pro on the side, I was confused as to why my Mac Studio specifically would need mouse drivers. Should've spotted that it was a lowercase S.

Personally, I would've probably tried to avoid confusion by wording it a bit differently (like "Mac-based studios" or "Mac-using studios") knowing that there is a product called "Mac Studio".

OJFord2• 2 years ago

Maybe they didn't know there was a product called 'Mac Studio'? I didn't.

(Seems to be a cross between the Mac Mini & Pro? Pretty sure used to be just the high-end Mini, not differently named. Or low-end Pro, I seem to remember they suddenly made the Pro a lot more expensive a few years ago.)

pimlottc• 2 years ago

Can you go into some more detail about some use-cases for this? Why would you have multiple screens "far apart from each other"?

ok_dad• 2 years ago

Not a Mac but this illustrates:

I have a screen for my simrig (racing wheel and pedals setup almost like a car cockpit) with a wireless keyboard that has a touchpad in it mounted to the rig. On my desk across the room, I have a screen, mouse and keyboard, and the PC that powers that rig. I have to turn one or the other monitor off in order to just use the one mouse next to it on it alone. If this was for Windows also, I would use it to keep the monitors separated with their own input devices.

I could imagine several creative workflows that could use setups separated like this, perhaps in a photo studio or a CNC shop.

jon-wood• 2 years ago

My Windows computer is connected to both a monitor on my desk, and a TV way over the other side of the room for playing games that make more sense that way. As the sibling post here mentioned, it can be kind of annoying to pick up the mouse and find the cursor is on the other side of the room.

giraffe_lady• 2 years ago

Music production is one for sure. Macs are the standard there and each screen usually represents a different "function" and is set up near the device or instrument it relates to. Most people use a macbook or ipad per "station" but for some setups you could run it all off one machine if the inputs were right. There are even workflow advantages to doing it that way. I've heard people wish for this.

lhamil642• 2 years ago

I'm not a Mac user but something like this would be nice for me. I'm visually impaired, and I have to be very close to the screen so I have my main monitor on an arm so it can float above my keyboard. Then I have a second screen (or laptop) on a desk next to me, but to see that I have to turn 90 degrees and lean in, which makes it awkward to use my keyboard/mouse. This is better with a laptop because it gives me a second keyboard/mouse for the second monitor, but I have to keep moving the cursor back and fourth. My solution so far has been to use Autohotkey to define some hotkeys that move my mouse to the center of my main display and the center of my secondary display, which works surprisingly well.

Although to be honest, I rarely use the second display. I mainly use it while screen sharing in a meeting so I can have notes and stuff up on my main display.

tough• 2 years ago

https://www.sharemouse.com/ could be useful to you sir

rekabis2• 2 years ago

I think that an auto-highlight-on-move, similar to mashing CTRL constantly on Windows, only with the screen-darkening ability of the double-CTRL-tap of Microsoft Powertoys, would be more effective for you.

As in, with every significant (user-magnitude-defined) motion of the mouse, all screens darken/grey-out except for a bright spotlight surrounding your mouse. Allows you to always see where your mouse is even up to near-blindness, as that spotlight is going to be 3-6cm in diameter regardless of the screen resolution, and obvious as heck.

Edit: been looking for a tool like this myself. Still have decent vision, but with six monitors at ≈1.5-2k resolution each, a cursor can go missing, fast. Would love to have cursor highlighting (no stupid Win98 “tail”, thanks) on any mouse movement.

jibbers• 2 years ago

I use my Mac as a desktop on one side of a room, connected to a display and a projector. The projector shines on the opposite wall of the room.

jitl4• 2 years ago

This is an Electron app, but it never opens a web view; it configures the tray using the native menu bar API. Neat.

I wish it was this easy to start with Swift. The SwiftUI API makes the menu stuff almost this easy, but dealing with Xcode projects and Apple Developer program auth stuff always put me off.

brailsafe3• 2 years ago

I was also surprised it's a TS project. I will say learning Swift and native macos dev during the last year without a job has been quite fun, and a nice departure from web stuff. Swift's type system is very similar to Typescript, and SwiftUI is somewhat similar to any component UI library, but it has it's own interesting bits. Xcode is a beast, but can be a decent IDE after you get familiarized to the quirks of the language and build process.

josephg3• 2 years ago

I find Xcode so unbelievably unstable for a modern set of developer tools. The last time I was using it to build software, it crashed about once a day, and froze or did weird things regularly. I've also had severe typing lag (!!) and phantom build issues where I build something and it fails with some strange linker error or something, but then doing a clean & rebuild mysteriously fixes everything.

And SwiftUI seems great on the surface until you spend time with it and try to actually do anything remotely custom. I spent about a week trying to get a swipe gesture able to push the keyboard out of the way (like you see in Apple Notes and most messaging applications). The web is full of half working hacks that throw up warning messages when the app is running. When things don't work its incredibly difficult figure out whats going on. The documentation is atrocious and the debugging tools are absolute rubbish compared to what you'll find in any modern web browser.

Coming back to writing typescript in VS Code or writing rust in Intellij felt like a breath of fresh air compared to working in Xcode. Everything works, and it works fast and reliably. I have good documentation and I can read the code I'm calling if I get confused.

I really like Swift as a language and I think Apple has a lot of great ideas there, but developing a swiftui app using apple's developer tooling was a miserable experience. Xcode feels like a cobbled together, buggy mess.

ustad2• 2 years ago

I was going to mention the typescript as well. How does typescript in electron get access to multiple mice hardware and also control multiple cursors? I would have thought that would be near impossible without going native.

jitl4• 2 years ago

Like Python or any other scripting language, via native extensions or FFI to native libraries.

node-hid uses native code to control human interface devices. Source code here: https://github.com/node-hid/node-hid/blob/484d13460a89939530...

hboon• 2 years ago

Do you mean generally run a SwiftUI app without Xcode + signing or running with access to menubars etc?

If it's the former, it's possible and very viable too https://www.objc.io/blog/2020/05/19/swiftui-without-an-xcode...

I just do something like: `cat base.swift foo.swift | swift -`

wodenokoto• 2 years ago

How do I get the scroll wheel on my mouse to scroll “reverse” of my trackpad?

I prefer “natural” scrolling on trackpad, but not on my mouse.

yboris• 2 years ago

Scroll Reverser might work: https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/

samatman• 2 years ago

This is what I use, it does the job. Flakes out when I plug in occasionally (5% of the time maybe?) but "ope, scroll wheel is backward, time to power-cycle the extension" isn't a crisis.

nmussy• 2 years ago

I haven't been using it for this purpose, but Linear Mouse should be able to do the trick:

https://linearmouse.app/

dharmab• 2 years ago

Can confirm LinearMouse makes this easy to set up.

mey• 2 years ago

If you have a Logitech mouse their software can handle that for you in the Mac. Why this isn't supported natively is beyond me

ahoka• 2 years ago

MacOS is death by a thousand papercuts to use due to these small things that need an app. Installing those apps cause other problems though.

dylan6042• 2 years ago

This is something frustrating. When a mouse is connected to a MBP, there is a separate system preference for the mouse and trackpad. However, the natural scrolling switch from each one follows the other, yet the tracking speed is able to be set separately. It is yet another sign of the cluster fuck that Apple's OS teams are

reactordev• 2 years ago

This is my biggest gripe with macOS. Natural scrolling is good on a trackpad but is a divide by zero in my brain for the mouse

akerr• 2 years ago

I use Better Mouse: https://better-mouse.com

square_usual• 2 years ago

As others have mentioned, there's quite a few options, and I use mos (https://github.com/Caldis/Mos) for no particular reason. It does the same things as any of the alternatives, I just found it first and stuck with it since.

deanputney• 2 years ago

Wow, really neat idea! Even if you're just using two monitors close to each other (a laptop and a monitor for example), I could see scenarios where it would help a ton to have fast access on one or the other.

iwontberude• 2 years ago

Especially with magic track pad, I could imagine this working quite well. You might be able to use both simultaneously with a single hand for some use cases.

alufers• 2 years ago

Does it work for touchscreens too? When I plug in a portable monitor with a touchscreen into my macOS laptop the touch input gets sent into the screen where the cursor is (ie. I touch the touchscreen but it clicks something on the internal display, because this is where I left the cursor), instead of always inputting on the physical monitor associated with this touchscreen.

deafpolygon• 2 years ago

This seems to be very useful, but can anyone illustrate what the use cases are? In my own uses, it would have limited value since I can do 98% of what I need to do with a single mouse.

lvturner• 2 years ago

Two player Lemmings[0] (came in to the comments to find an Amiga reference, didn't find one, so leaving my own)

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chv49bHtLUY&t=256s

yencabulator2• 2 years ago

I don't think this hack makes macOS actually have to pointers, it just teleports the pointer to the screen associated with the input device you're using.

no_time• 2 years ago

So is this basically hacking in multiseat support for an OS that doesn't have it? Fascinating stuff.

yencabulator2• 2 years ago

It doesn't sound like true multiseat, they're still the same session, there's only one focused window, etc.

callalex• 2 years ago

Interestingly enough, macOS is multi-seat. You can start a desktop environment as different users over VNC without interrupting the physical user of the machine.

pzmarzly• 2 years ago

What happens when you put 2 cursors over the same app, and the app checks for cursor position (e.g. video games, on-hover UI)? Will it get one of 2 cursors? Or will it see nothing, and then when you click something, the cursor will "teleport" to the place where you clicked? Or does it use some magic multitouch macOS API?

If anyone has installed this project and wants to check this, here is a test page that can help: https://codepen.io/ahmedbnabouelezz/pen/wvWZWjO

OJFord2• 2 years ago

I think surely it 'teleports' - the one activating hovers is presumably the last moved; I think others must be dummy placeholders as it were, not actually independent simultaneously usable cursors.

Thorrez• 2 years ago

Will there be 2 cursors at the same time? The way I read the GitHub page, I thought there would only ever be 1 cursor at a time. When you switch mice, I thought the cursor would teleport to the other monitor, to the place where it was last used on that other monitor.

jonwinstanley• 2 years ago

Bravo, building this must not have been easy

ramses0• 2 years ago

I think it's relatively straightforward? Each mouse should be generating input events, it's "just" a matter of "Mouse1 += (100x, 200y)", "Mouse2 += (-3x, -5y)" and keeping track of a virtual cursor/pointer position that the "real" cursor should jump to depending on which mouse is generating input events.

...and for the use cases, having an extended desktop (eg: airplay to HDTV mounted on the wall) and being able to have your primary "desktop" mouse 100% glued to your main screen, but a secondary "click the play next video button on the tv" mouse is genius!

I'm pretty sure if somebody were sufficiently innovative they could paint a bullseye/target around the virtual cursors with some sort of minor performance penalty (a-la: xNeko - https://github.com/crgimenes/neko).

thatxliner• 2 years ago

Isn’t this just Universal Control?

gwbas1c• 2 years ago

Why not use two computers?

rekabis2• 2 years ago

When all current operating systems make the fundamental assumption of only one application window having “focus” at one time (even down to individual application elements having exclusive focus), how does having multiple cursors do anything other than massively cock-block everyone in control of a cursor?

I can see this as being nothing more than a Battle Royale for control of whatever UI element you are trying to interact with, while fighting off the control that other users want to have of other UI elements that they are trying to interact with.

In other words, a massively shitty hairball where everyone gets frustrated to the point of rage-quitting.

Edit: just try using a remote-access/remote-support software, like RustDesk, where each user (when more than one have access to a desktop) get their own cursor (even if you can’t see the other person’s cursor). You end up walking on eggshells trying to avoid the other person’s application/UI focus.

Dynamouse: Mouse driver for Mac studios

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