Full Screen Display

The Chicken can be toggled in and out of full screen display by pressing the keyboard combination, which in the English language version, is command-option-control-`. The 'command' key is also known as the 'Apple' key. The back-quote (`) is the character immediately to the left of the number '1' on American keyboards.

If this key combination interferes with your work, or is not convenient on international keyboards, it can be changed in the Keyboard tab of the Preferences.

While in full screen mode, you cannot interact with the Dock or with any other programs running locally on your Macintosh. If the remote screen is larger than your local screen, the display will 'auto-scroll' when the mouse is close the edge of the screen. The scrolling speed and the presence of scrollbars can be adjusted in the Fullscreen tab of the Preferences.

Copy and Paste

VNC supports copying and pasting text to and from the clipboard of the remote server. Whenever you copy text on the remote server (and the server supports it), Chicken will place the text in your local clipboard. To transfer text to the server, you have two options. If you choose Paste from the Edit menu, Chicken will simulate keystrokes typing the text from the clipboard. The Paste to Remote Clipboard menu item will send the text to the server's clipboard.

Note that, due to inherent limitations with VNC, copying from and pasting to the server's clipboard only works for text compatible with the Latin-1 encoding, which includes most Western European languages. In principle, Paste works for any script. However, as always, Chicken is dependent on what operations are supported by the server.

More About Connections

Chicken supports server autodiscovery using Bonjour. To enable it, select the Use Bonjour item in Chicken's application menu. Servers that advertise themselves using Bonjour will automatically show up in your bookmarks window!

If you wish to connect to a server without using bookmarks, just choose New Connection from the File menu. Of course, if you decide that you want to bookmark the server, you can always check the "Save Server" button before you connect.

You can get back to the bookmarks window you saw when you launched Chicken by selecting Open Connection from the File menu.

You can connect to a server that is behind a firewall by using a listening connection. Choose Listen for Server from the File menu and then set the VNC server up to initiate a listening connection to your client machine.

Command Line Usage

You can use Chicken by calling it from the command line. To do this, you should 'cd' to the location of Chicken. Then, do the following:

cd Chicken.app/Contents/MacOS/
./Chicken

To get help on command line invocation, add "--help" to the invocation.