So you’ve turned on Screen Sharing on your Mac and now you want to control it from your Windows computer.  Quickly, you find out that you can’t use the Remote Desktop Connection because the Mac uses the VNC protocol. 

I downloaded the UltraVNC client and the results were less than encouraging:

  • The connection was slow.
  • Right-click did not work.  That is not 100% correct – it worked when you clicked the mouse wheel.
  • Double-click didn’t work either.

Turns out you gotta do some tweaks to fix the last two (will get to the first problem later).  In the Options dialog, uncheck Emulate 3 Buttons, and check Swap mouse buttons 2 and 3.
Connection Options

Finally, after dismissing the Options dialog, check Save connection settings as default, before you click the Connect button. Otherwise, you’ll have to repeat this procedure every time.
Ultr@VNC Viewer

Switching those 2 checkboxes solved the problem for me.  I was able to easily right-click on items and double-click them.  Somehow the entire setup felt faster too.  Speaking of speed, VNC feels a lot more sluggish than Remote Desktop and there isn’t a whole lot you could do to produce dramatic improvements.  However, there are some debatable gains to be had if you follow these simple rules (none of them will make you happy though):

  1. Be on a fast network.
  2. Don’t be on a slow network.
  3. Reduce the screen resolution on the Mac.  Short of replacing your network, this will probably yield biggest impact.
  4. In VNC Options, reduce the amount of colors to 256 or 8.  Of course, it will look like something out of the nineties, but it was (very) marginally faster.  The transferred byte count was smaller at least.
  5. You can disable animations on the Mac to make it “feel” faster, but again, I didn’t like the result, though it did feel faster.  Just make sure you know how to restore the defaults later.