Why can't I use two or more keyboards/mice at the same time on one computer?
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Music by Eric Matyas
https://www.soundimage.org
Track title: Droplet of life
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Chapters
00:00 Why Can'T I Use Two Or More Keyboards/Mice At The Same Time On One Computer?
00:23 Answer 1 Score 2
00:44 Answer 2 Score 1
00:55 Answer 3 Score 6
01:42 Answer 4 Score 3
02:53 Thank you
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Full question
https://superuser.com/questions/135922/w...
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Content licensed under CC BY-SA
https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/lice...
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Tags
#windows #keyboard
#avk47
ANSWER 1
Score 6
No OS that I know of supports two independent cursors, or keyboard inputs to the same session.
Microsoft does however support two (or more) different users sessions on one PC. It's called Windows Multipoint and is aimed at medical and educational situations, but could work anywhere really. This allows a PC to have two keyboards, mice, and screens at the same time; and the sessions on the screens are independent.
HP makes a MS 6000 desktop that does this, and T100 modules to plugin additional stations. You can add quite a few additional stations if the workload is very light.
X can already do this sort of thing by setting up two different X servers with different configurations (for the screen, keyboard, and mouse).
ANSWER 2
Score 3
There are other good answers looking for workarounds, but none so far seem to explain why the feature doesn't exist. Windows can't do this for a number of reasons. Among them:
Nobody programmed this feature because very few people would use it. Although you clearly have a desire to play with this feature, how many people could use this? Programmer time isn't free, so paying them to design this feature would necessarily prevent the development of some other feature. What feature in Windows would you like them to have not programmed in order to have this?
The user interface for this would be confusing. The mouse cursors and insertion points could have different colors to tell them apart, but when you click to start typing somewhere, which keyboard gets the input? Does each mouse create an insertion point for just one of the keyboards? You've now also created the concept of having two simultaneous active windows. If they overlap, which one is on top? If a program asks the OS where the mouse pointer is, which one does it get the answer for? I'm sure there are tons of other situations where a new UI would need to be designed to accomodate two independent input sources.
ANSWER 3
Score 2
There is a project called Multi-Pointer X (aka MPX) on X.org user system (like Linux). Here is a demo.
But I think that a MPX-like system would be available on Windows, help to the "Surface" project development and the new multi-touch supports.
ANSWER 4
Score 1
MS research is working on two or more mice here.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/india/projects/edulab/multipoint.html