Using a single trackpad/mouse for both an ipad and mac

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Hi, is there any way to use a single trackpad to control both a mac and an ipad?

I just saw a tutorial that said that you needed to disconnect the trackpad from the mac in bluetooth settings before you can use it with the ipad, but i want to use the trackpad with both the ipad and mac and be able to switch between them easily. I’ve used an application called 1keyboard that allows you to switch keyboards between ipads and macs, is there anything like that for using a trackpad or a mouse? Or is there any other way to quickly use a trackpad with both an ipad and a mac without having to disconnect in bluetooth settings?

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Tooth Fairy may help on macOS.

https://c-command.com/toothfairy/

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Logitech mice can connect to up to 3 devices. They have a switch on the bottom that lets you select 1, 2, or 3.

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Yup — I find that their system works really well — I have a mouse set up to work on a three different devices: 1 Windows, 1 Mac, 1 iOS.

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I hadn’t thought of this, and I would dearly love to switch between my MacBook and iPad with my Magic Trackpad… but it doesn’t work very well.

Yes, ToothFairy help you disconnect it from the Mac, but then you need to go into Bluetooth settings on the iPad and tap ‘Connect’ and hope that the trackpad connects to the iPad instead of the Mac.

It was not at all reliable in my experience.

Apple will probably never make a Trackpad that switches between two devices, so… yeah.

BTW I have a Logitech MX trackball, and it’s great, but nothing is as good as Apple’s trackpad.

le sigh

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What you could do is use Toothfairy on the mac with a global shortcut set.
In Keyboard Maestro create a macro to trigger the hotkey

And if you on the iPad it’s still connected to the Mac just fire off a shortcut with the KM remote trigger for that macro.

That would fire off the hotkey on the mac, making it easier to connect on the iPad. Should get rid of at least half the hit-or-miss connections

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FYI the main competitor to Tooth Fairy is AirBuddy, and the dev has been seeding a 2.0 beta to testers. He talked about new features on the latest episode of StackTrace, including being able to easily pair AirPods with the Mac, using undocuments Apple APIs. Timestamped discussion starts here:

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My experience matches @tjluoma’s. Using Tooth Fairy (which I have through Setapp) to disconnect my Magic Trackpad 2 from the Mac does save some time, and I can reconnect to the Mac quickly by plugging it via Lightning.

The time suck is connecting to the iPad. Simply tapping the MT2 from the list of unconnected devices in the Bluetooth settings has never worked. There’s always some go-round of forgetting the MT2 and then re-pairing. Sometimes this takes only one attempt but not usually.

The only way I know of to get around this is to buy a new MT2 just for the iPad.

1 Like
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I’m using Logitech MX Vertical mouse and MX Keys keyboard. Tap the device selection button on each and you switch devices. Easy peasy.

Both of those devices also support Logitech’s Flow software that allows more seamless device transition between a Mac and a Windows machine.

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I hoped you could add a shortcut on the iPad that connects the trackpad but that does not work. I’ve found this works quicker for airpods than the bluetooth interface, by setting them as airplay destinations.

After I wrote the reply yesterday I tested the KM remote trigger with my mac, and that works as expected. Found I could now switch from mac to iPad within seconds.

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I wish somebody made a trackpad with the same feature…

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I’d like to see your Shortcuts. Neither Settings nor Control Center work quickly for me.

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Bugger

Oh well, worth a try

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I did the wrong test, only my airpods one works.
So back to sending in a feature request to apple.

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Did someone found a better way to quickly swap connectivity of the magic trackpad between Mac and Ipad? Any new KM / Shortcut / Toothfairy avenue for that?

17

I looked and looked and … eventually just bought a second Magic Trackpad.

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18

Same here, problem is iOS

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Ditto. Nice excuse to have two different colors so you can tell them apart. If you look for a while you can usually get about $30 off (sometimes more!) for a MT2.

The other option would be to abandon bluetooth and physically switch the keyboard and mouse (with a kvm switch or just a hub of some sort).