rkvm

rkvm is a tool for sharing keyboard and mouse across multiple Linux machines. It is based on a client/server architecture, where server is the machine controlling mouse and keyboard and relays events (mouse move, key presses, ...) to clients.

Switching between different clients is done by a configurable keyboard shortcut.

Features

TLS encrypted by default, backed by rustls
Display server agnostic
Low overhead

Requirements

Rust 1.48 and higher
The uinput Linux kernel module, enabled by default in most distros. You can confirm that it's enabled in your distro by checking that /dev/uinput exists.
libevdev development files (sudo apt install libevdev-dev on Debian/Ubuntu)
Clang/LLVM (sudo apt install clang on Debian/Ubuntu)

Configuration

After installation...

Generate a certificate and private key using the rkvm-certificate-gen tool or provide your own from other sources.
For server, place both the certificate and private key in /etc/rkvm/certificate.pem and /etc/rkvm/key.pem respectively.
For client, place the certificate to /etc/rkvm/certificate.pem
Create a config if you haven't done so already. Server:
```
# cp /etc/rkvm/server.example.toml /etc/rkvm/server.toml
```
Client:
```
# cp /etc/rkvm/client.example.toml /etc/rkvm/client.toml
```
Do not edit the example configs, they will be overwritten by your package manager.
Change the password and optionally reconfigure the network listen address and key bindings for switching clients

Enable and start the systemd service. Server:

# systemctl enable rkvm-server
# systemctl start rkvm-server

Client:

# systemctl enable rkvm-client
# systemctl start rkvm-client

Why rkvm and not Barrier/Synergy?

The author of this program had a lot of problems with said programs, namely his keyboard layout (Czech) not being supported properly, which stems from the fact that the programs send characters which it then attempts to translate back into keycodes. rkvm takes a different approach to solving this problem and doesn't assume anything about your keyboard layout -- it sends raw keycodes only.

Additionally, rkvm doesn't even know or care about X, Wayland or any display server that might be in use, because it uses the uinput API with libevdev to read and generate input events.

Regardless, if you want a working and stable solution for crossplatform keyboard and mouse sharing, you should probably use either of the above mentioned programs for the time being.

Limitations

Only keyboard and relative mouse events work (no support for touchpads or other absolutely positioned devices)
Linux only

Project structure

rkvm-server - server application code
rkvm-client - client application code
rkvm-input - handles reading from and writing to input devices
rkvm-net - network protocol encoding and decoding
rkvm-certificate-gen - certificate generation tool

Bincode is used for encoding of messages on the network and Tokio as an asynchronous runtime.

Contributions

All contributions, that includes both PRs and issues, are very welcome.

License

MIT

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