GoKawiilState of multi-player Wayland
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!
(Yes, my default mouse cursor is a turtle.)
Why would you even want this?
I admit that this is a somewhat esoteric way of using computers. But hear me out:
It’s convenient for pair programming: One person can fix a bug in one window, while the other browses the documentation!
It’s fun for games! Using multiple controllers is the norm, why not multiple mice?
This style of multi-player computing facilitates collaboration inside of applications very naturally, without the need for complicated synchronization algorithms.
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