Browser Selection

I use different browsers on my MacBook, roughly dividing between “work” stuff (-> Chrome) and “personal” stuff (-> Firefox). I want to be able to click links anywhere and have them open in the right browser automatically. Luckily, there are tools for that

  • Finicky - Open Source
    • The tool I used on my old MacBook. Works fine, but the configuration is filebased, with no GUI option
    • There is now an online generator for initial configurations: Finicky Kickstart
    • No popup selector
  • Browserosaurus - Open Source
    • Popup selector only, seems to have no rule engine
  • BrowserFairy - Proprietary
    • Testing now on the new MacBook
    • Graphical user interface for rule creation, seems alright.
    • Popup selector either when no rule matches, or specifically for certain rules.
  • Choosy
    • Not free

Synergy

Back in the day, I used an opensource tool called “Synergy” to share mouse & keyboard across multiple computers/laptops. These days, it seems that it has gone commercial, which is unfortunate. However there seem to be older versions and forks available but it’s not clear what works when exactly.

Synergy 3

The now commercial version

Synergy 1 Community Edition

apparently still available and free to use

The README recommends to install it on MacOS via homebrew. But when doing so, this seems to install the proprietary versino of Syngery 1 which requires a license key. It’s also not available as a deb package, nor in any debian repository. There seems to be a debian packaging repo for this here, but it’s quite out of date, compared to the original repo.

Barrier

Barrier seems to be a fork of Synergy one. There’s little development in the repo, latest commit to master was 2 years ago, but it’s available as a MacOS package as well as in debian repositories, so I went with it for now

SSL Setup does not seem to work out of the box, so the only way to get it up and running was to disable SSL. I should address this somehow. There’s already an issue about it: https://github.com/debauchee/barrier/issues/2076

Uptime Monitoring