My Win2VNC

Win2VNC manual

Credits: Text on this page is taken from both Fredrik Hubinette's Win2VNC page and the original AT&T VNC viewer 3.3.3 documentation page. It is edited for content to reflect Win2VNC in it's current incarnation and is substantially modified since.

Index

1. What it does
2. How it works
3. Setup connection
4. About setting options
5. Options list
6. Command line options
7. Options dialog
8. Support and updates

What it does

This program will let you use two screens on two different computers as if they were connected to the same computer. It even works between different operating systems.

If you have two or more computers on your desk and you are tired of having several keyboards and mice around to control them, this is the program for you. While running this program, you can move the mouse pointer beyond the right or left edge of your primary display and the pointer will appear on the other computer screen.

How it works

The operation itself is almost identical to x2x, but most of the code was actually borrowed from the program vncviewer.

Win2VNC works with Windows NT/2000/XP. Note that if your secondary machine is running X-windows, you will need to use x0rfbserver rather than the regular Xvnc server to achieve the proper effect.

Win2VNC normally lives in the system tray and has a menu there that allows you to exit the program, send syskey events and save connection options.

Setup connection

You can run Win2VNC from the command line or from a shortcut and it will prompt you for a display:

You can specify a display on the command line:

And you can run it with -h to get a list of other important options. The full list is below. These can all take either - or / as the switch character. Most of the options can also be set from the 'Options...' dialog box which is available from the initial connection prompt before connecting, and some from the system menu by clicking the Win2VNC logo in the top-left corner of the window after connection, and selecting 'Connection options...'.

This tray icon identifies a normal Win2VNC instance.	This tray icon identifies a listening Win2VNC instance.

The system menu also allows you to see some information about the connection, start new connections, and send a Ctrl-Alt-Del to a remote machine. This will only have an effect if the remote server is able to interpret it, currently only true for VNC server running as a service under Windows NT/2000/2003.

Keystrokes such as Ctrl-Esc and Alt-Tab may be interpreted at the local (controlling) machine. If you want to send them to the remote machine, you can use the options on the viewer menu to send individual Ctrl-down, Ctrl-up, Alt-down and Alt-up keystrokes. For example, to type Ctrl-Esc on the remote machine, send Ctrl-down using the menu, press Esc, and then send Ctrl-up (or just tap the Ctrl key) to release the Ctrl key at the remote end.

Starting with version 1.2.0 Win2VNC supports sending (a limited set of) system key strokes to the remote system. More details on how the Scroll Lock key determines Win2VNC behavior is described in the 'IgnoreScrollLock' option.

New since version 1.3.0 is the multi-head support. Starting with version 1.3.1 it is possible to fix the Win2VNC edge window to a specific display. In the 'Connection Options...' dialog this is found under 'Edge Location'. If 'default' is specified, Win2VNC behaves like it did in 1.3.0 and chooses the most logical display to put the edge on depending on the direction specified. Any other selection pins the edge location to a specified display.

The version is shown in the 'about' dialog as shown below.

About setting options

Options can be set from three places:

1. configuration file (-config <file>)
2. Windows registry
3. program arguments (command line)

If options are specified more than once, the are loaded in the priority specified above. Any option set before will be overridden by a higher priority method (i.e. command line overrules registry).

Command line options

The command line options are listed below in the options list.

Options list

Shared connection

-shared

When you make a connection to a VNC server, all other existing connections are normally closed. This is for security reasons, and because we normally think of VNC as a tool for mobility: your desktop follows you from place to place. This option asks the server to leave any existing connections open, allowing you to share the desktop with someone already using it. Some servers have options to change the default behavior and to override this request.

Load from configuration file

-config file

You can save all the details of an open connection to a file using a command from the menu. You can then restart that connection at a later date by specifying the name of the file using this switch.

Register file association

-register

This tells the Windows shell that .w2v files are associated with the Win2VNC. You should then be able to double-click on them to start the session. Sometimes Windows seems to need restarting before this take effect.

Emulate three button mice

-emulate3

Users with a two-button mouse can emulate a middle button by pressing both buttons at once if this option is enabled on the command line or in the dialog box. Note: On recent versions of the viewer this is the default, so there's now a -noemulate3 option to turn it off if wanted.

-noemulate3

Opposite of -emulate3

-emulate3timeout

When using 3-button emulation, both mouse buttons must be pressed within a certain period for them to be registered as a single middle-click instead of separate left and right clicks. This option allows that time period to be specified in milliseconds. The default is 100.

-emulate3fuzz

When using 3-button emulation, both mouse buttons must be pressed within a certain distance of each other for them to be registered as a single middle-click. This option allows that distance to be specified in pixels. The default is 4.

Swap mouse buttons

-swapmouse

This option was more commonly used before the 3-button emulation was available. Normally the PC buttons left-middle-right are mapped on to X buttons 1,2,3. This switch causes them to be mapped onto buttons 1,3,2, which may be more useful for two-button users who only have left-right, because they will then get buttons 1 & 2 instead of 1 & 3.
If combined with 3-button emulation, this also causes the middle button to emulate button 3 instead of button 2. This may be useful if you use button 2 more.

Disable clipboard integration

-disableclipboard

Clipboard changes caused by cutting or copying at either the viewer or server end are normally transmitted to the other end. This option disables clipboard transfers.

Logging and debugging

-logfile filename

Win2VNC has a logging mechanism which can save some debugging information to a file or display it on a console. This option specifies the name of a file to which a log will be written.

-loglevel n

This option controls the amount of logging information sent to the log file. The default is zero, and higher values (up to 99) will provide more detail.

-console

In addition to, or instead of, logging to a file, this option will cause the debugging information to be sent to a console window.

International keyboard support

-senddeadkey

Turn on SendDeadKey feature, i.e. XK_dead_<xxx> and the following base characters will be sent separately.

-nodeadkey

Turn off SendDeadKey feature, i.e. Win2VNC will try to compose the dead key and the following base characters locally and then send the result to the server. The result may be a single composed haracter or 2 sequence of charcaters in case of the dead key and the base character can not be composed.

Listener mode

-listen <TCP port #>

Create a TCP listener port that a VNC server can connect to. This may be useful in rare occasions where your workstations are on different network subnets with firewall(s) in between. In general most Win2VNC users will not need this option.

Automatic reconnect

-AutoReconnect <reconnect delay is seconds>

Switch on automatic reconnecting after being disconnected by a server. The reconnect delay time is used spend idle before actually reconnecting, this is done to avoid excessive resource use (cpu / network) while a connection can not yet be reestablished, for instance when a server is not yet finished restarting. The minimum delay is zero seconds, disabling the automatic reconnect, the maximum is 32767. Please note, Win2VNC does not detect if the disconnect is due to a failure or deliberate by a user/operator on the server. Please use this option wise to avoid inconvenience (or worse).

Scroll lock behavior

-IgnoreScrollLock

Some application make use of the Scroll Lock key status to determine the way to behave. One application in particular is Microsoft Office Excel (spreadsheet). In this application the Scroll Lock key defines how the scrolling of the worksheet is done.

In order to have this functionality operational you must enable 'Scroll Lock' on the controlling system. If scroll lock is disabled, the key strokes will be send to the controlling system as usual.

Since version 1.3.1 the behavior for sending system keys has changed:

Scroll Lock off:
All keys are transparently transferred to server, except:

• Ctrl+Alt+Del -> invoke OS interrupt
• Ctrl+Alt+Ins -> invoke Ctrl+Alt+Del sequence to be sent to server

Scroll Lock on:
No keys are transferred to server, so that user can invoke system or user defined hotkeys, i.e. changing client keyboard, etcetera. Win2VNC own/local hotkeys for this mode:

• Alt+S -> toggle server Scroll Lock
• Alt+I -> send Ctrl+Alt+Ins sequence to server

In version 1.4.0 there is an option to ignore the Scroll-lock key. If this option is used Win2VNC will always behave as if Scroll-lock is off regarding less the state of the key. In the extraordinary case Win2VNC messes up with the keyboard handling, you can still regain control by using Ctrl-Alt-Del, because this key combination is always catched locally, and start the task manager from there.

Note: Without the command line switches 'senddeadkey' or 'nodeadkey' the state of the SendDeadKey feature will be determined by key SendDeadKey value in the registry. If SendDeadKey registry key does not exist, used default value True.

Options dialog

The picture below shows a sample option dialog. Click on any location in the picture to find out more on a specific option.

Support and updates

For support and updates go to the project page at SourceForge.net:
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/win2vnc/