Sharing bluetooth keyboard/mouse with two Macs

[sammyman]

I have two macs, and one bluetooth keyboard and mouse. I am hoping to share them with both computers. I found the following explaining how to do this which was helpful. This seems to work for my keyboard, but not my mouse. My mouse won't sync the first time I try, but requires me to try to sync twice. Therefore, the following just doesn't seem to work. Any ideas on another solution to my problem?

Well, I figured out the answer to my own question. Yes, you can share a bluetooth keyboard and mouse with two Macs. Here's how you do it.

First, you need to pair the bluetooth mouse and keyboard with both Macs. Unless both Macs are laptops, you'll need a wired mouse to do this. Once both Macs have been paired with the mouse and keyboard, you need a way to switch from one Mac to the other. The basic process is to turn off bluetooth on the Mac you're switching from, and activate the mouse and keyboard with the Mac you're switching to.

For instance, suppose the mouse and keyboard are currently paired with your MacBook, and you want to pair them with your iMac. Follow these steps:

1. On the MacBook, disable bluetooth
2. On the iMac, enable bluetooth
3. Click the mouse and type on the keyboard to connect them to the iMac

The catch is that you'll need to keep a wired mouse available to enable bluetooth on the iMac/Mac Pro/Mac Mini in step 2. So here's a clever variation: add a step 4 where you automatically re-enable bluetooth on the MacBook.

The way to do this is to download the blueutil utility from www.frederikseiffert.de. With this, you can create a very simple Automator action around the following shell script:

/usr/local/bin/blueutil off
sleep 60
/usr/local/bin/blueutil on

Run that utility on the computer you want to switch from, and you're ready to go! I would still keep a wired mouse available in case there is a glitch, but this should handle it. Enjoy!