Screen Sharing on El Capitan

Screen sharing on the Mac is really useful.  There are a few ways to do this once screen sharing is turned on in the System preferences pane.

• You can select the machine name at the side of the Finder and then the "share screen" tab.
• You can run the 'Screen Sharing' App from Spotlight or directly from "/System/Library/CoreServices/Applications/Screen Sharing"

However, did you know that when you connect via screensharing to different remote, a file is created in your home directory at 

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.ScreenSharing/Data/Library/Application Support/Screen Sharing/

containing information on how you connected to the machine?  The good thing about these files is that they can be used to reconnect to the machines by just double clicking on them.  This means that you can use screen sharing to connect to a machine much faster than the two methods shown above.

To make this more convenient for me to use I did the following.

• Created a folder in my home directory called "Remote Machines"
• In the Finder, select "Go" and then press the "ALT/Option" key to show the hidden folder 'Library" and then navigate down to ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.ScreenSharing/Data/Library/Application Support/Screen Sharing/
• Option/ALT click and drag all of the files to the "Remote Machines" folder created above to copy them, rather than move them.
• Drag the "Remote Machines" folder into the right-hand side of the dock (to the right of the faint-white lines which separate the Trash from applications)

Now when you click on that folder in the dock, you'll see a list of machines that you can connect to directly.  You can add to this folder at any time when you connect to new machines.

Note that this is not limited to other OSX machines, the files are also created if you connect with a standard VNC protocol to another machine running VNC.  e.g. Linux VNC server, Raspberry Pi VNC server etc.

Now that the folder has the links to start off a screen sharing session, the icons can be changed to make them more meaningful.  Follow my post on this for details on how to do this in El Capitan.

The same method can be used under previous versions of OSX, but the location of the Screen Saring folder is different.  e.g. under Lion they are held under:

~/Library/Application Support/Screen Sharing/

Other locations in other releases are left as an exercise for the reader.