C-Command Software Forum

Fast switching mouse + keyboard between macs

ToothFairy
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#1

I’m trying to use Toothfairy to quickly switch my Magic Mouse and Magic Keyboard from my work Macbook to my personal one and vice versa. I use Toothfairy menu icons on both macs, disconnect both my mouse and keyboard from my work mac, and then try to connect them to my personal mac.

It never works easily: most of the time my mouse connects to the other mac only after a couple of tries (clicks on icon and then spinning on the menu item), but I can’t get my keyboard to connect just with Toothfairy -> I click the menuitem to connect the keyboard to the other mac, but it fails, or a spinner starts spinning over the icon and then fails. A lot of the time the keyboard just reconnects to the work mac. I also need to turn on/off the mouse/keyboard during this to get it to move.

If it’s not connecting, I need to open up the bluetooth panel in settings and start the connect/disconnect procedure there. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn’t budge and I need to physically connect the keyboard with a usb charger cable to the macbook, when suddenly it awakes from coma and connects via bluetooth (I can then unplug the usb cable, and the bluetooth connection remains).

Is anybody else trying to do something like this? Any tips? Why doesn’t the keyboard connect without hesitation? It would be great to get this to work

Thanks

ToothFairy use case: Sharing a Magic Trackpad between multiple Macs
#2

Which version of macOS do you have? I would expect this to just work, without any retries. What error does it report when it doesn’t connect?

#3

Catalina 10.15.6
There is no error message. Sometimes Toothfairy icon switches to ON when the connection has not actually been established (no connected popup message from MacOS), other times there is a spinner over the icon and then it returns to disconnected. I keep needing to switch off-on the physical buttons on the mouse / keyboard for anything to start happening on the other mac.

#4

It is possible that the first Mac is interfering and trying to grab the devices back. Have you tried turning off Bluetooth there until the devices are connected to the second Mac?

#5

Yes, that seems to be happening. I anticipated that by disconnecting, it would not try to grab the devices back so soon - seems like the other mac doesn’t even have a chance to connect to the disconnected mouse / keyboard. Any way to influence this? Turning BT on/off is yet another step in the process.

#6

I don’t think there’s a way to prevent the Mac from auto-connecting except to turn off Bluetooth temporarily.