Article URL: https://blinry.org/multi-seat-wayland/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49092112 Points: 40 # Comments: 17

I’ve been fascinated by the idea of attaching multiple mice to one computer, and then having multiple mouse cursors inside of one desktop environment! I just spent three weeks investigating how well that’s currently supported on Linux & Wayland. Let me tell you what I found! The results are surprisingly cool. Together with this blog post, I’m publishing a number of little tools and patched libraries that add or improve “multi-seat” support. But many pieces in this puzzle are still incomplete or missing. I marked some “open projects ideas” with a 📝 emoji throughout the blog post. By publishing this post, I hope to find people who are interested in exploring and expanding this space together. If that’s you, reach out! I admit that this is a somewhat esoteric way of using computers. But hear me out: Here’s an overview of how well “multi-seat” is currently supported in various software: I’m going to use the term “seat” a lot in this post. It describes input devices that are grouped together, to be used by the same person. For example, you could have two people in front of one computer, and each one has their own mouse and their own keyboard. In this setup, there would be two “seats”, and every seat has one mouse and one keyboard: The type of seat I’m interested in is sometimes called a “logical seat”. This is where multiple people are in front of one computer, and each have their own mouse/keyboard, but they control the same desktop environment. As in, the desktop shows multiple mouse cursors! The people can “hand over” windows to each other, draw together into a whiteboard application, or directly collaborate within the same software. (Not that all of these things would be possible right now, but, you know, conceptually!) I think there could be a term that’s describing this concept even better – in the title of this post, I picked “multi-player”, to make clear that it’s mostly about multiple people who are collaborating. I’ve also seen “multi-cursor” or “multi-pointer” (which are missing the keyboard component).