Feature tour · 8 of 16
Keyboard and mouse
Plug them into the tablet and drive the Mac
A keyboard and a mouse connected to the tablet drive the Mac, not Android. Add Alone, where the tablet is the only screen the Mac has, and it stops being a second display and becomes the machine you are working at.
A mouse is not a large finger
A mouse takes its own route to the Mac instead of being handled as a touch. That is what makes the right button a right button and the wheel a wheel, because both are things a finger has no way to say.
The wheel scrolls by the right amount
One notch of the wheel moves what one notch moves on the Mac. macOS counts scrolling in lines rather than pixels, so a notch passed straight through would read as a wheel that barely turns.
One pointer on screen, not two
The tablet draws its own cursor and cannot be told not to, so Decky hides the Mac's while you are driving and brings it back a moment after you stop. Otherwise you get two, one trailing the other.
A real keyboard, and no on-screen one
Attach a keyboard and the tablet stops asking Android for one of its own. No strip along the bottom of the screen, and no editor claiming it needs an on-screen keyboard nobody wanted.
Command, option, control and shift
Modifiers are carried across and land on the Mac as the ones it expects, so the chords you already know reach it rather than stopping at the tablet.
With Alone, it is simply a Mac
Alone makes the tablet the only screen the Mac has. Add a keyboard and a mouse and there is very little left to tell you that you are not sitting at the machine, and the on-screen shortcut panel is still there for what a keyboard cannot reach.