One bluetooth keyboard, one monitor, but TWO macs.

I use and HDMI TV as mon­i­tor, dif­fer­ent macs on dif­fer­ent HDMI chan­nels and it was really tricky for me to find out how to switch between them using ONE blue­tooth key­board and track­pad. The prob­lem is: You have to cut the estab­lished blue­tooth key­board and touch­pad con­nec­tion in order to be able to estab­lish a new connection.

When mess­ing with this, it seems almost impos­si­ble, a momen­tum 22. You have to cut the con­nec­tion by turn­ing off the Blue­tooth, but then you can do noth­ing. The solu­tion is Apple Remote Desk­top (ARD). Do like this:

1. Open ARD and con­nect to the com­puter you want to estab­lish a blue­tooth connection.
2. Make sure blue­tooth is enabled on that other computer.
3. Shut down ARD.
4. Turn OFF Blue­tooth on the com­puter that cur­rently had a blue­tooth connection
5. Switch to the other com­puter and turn on-off the trackpad.
6. When con­nec­tion is estab­lished, con­nect the key­board as well.

Update: Now that TeamViewer is the best way to run any other com­puter from remote, this post may seem out­dated. How­ever, han­dling one blue­tooth key­board with sev­eral com­put­ers in the same net­work remains, so I decided to keep this post.

This works great and I can switch on the TV between the com­put­ers because they are on dif­fer­ent HDMI channels.