Don’t sell that dusty old iPad! One developer, 696 commits later, it’s turned into a “second laptop” for your Mac: free, open source, no account required.

Sill hit the front page of Hacker News today: it mirrors any window on your Mac (or your entire desktop) to your iPhone / iPad in real time — and you can control it directly:

1️⃣ Touch, Apple Pencil, external keyboard and trackpad all work, including three-finger gestures for switching desktops

2️⃣ “Laptop mode”: hold the iPad upright, with the Mac screen on top and a row of shortcut keys plus a trackpad below

3️⃣ No server involved: same Wi-Fi, a USB cable, or a direct peer-to-peer connection like AirDrop — TLS-encrypted the whole way

4️⃣ Two-way clipboard sync: copy on your Mac, paste straight on your device

5️⃣ On the go: pair it with a VPN like Tailscale and reach your Mac at home from anywhere

Unlike Sidecar, it can mirror a single window, and it works on iPhone too.

💡 Install: on the Mac, brew install --cask saffsanity/sill/sill; on iPhone / iPad, search for Sill in the App Store. Both are free. Requires an Apple silicon Mac with macOS 14 or later.

https://github.com/Saffsanity/sill

So what is that old iPad at your house doing right now?