I use screensharing quite a bit, both at home and at work, to connect to machines. As part of this, my process for connection has looked something like this:
1. Verify I’m on the right network.
2. On the Mac I’m connecting from, under the Go menu, select Connect to Server…
3. In the Server Address: line, enter the address of the Mac which I want to remotely connect to:
vnc://computer_name_here.domain.com
4. Logging in by entering my authentication credentials into the screensharing login window’s username and password blanks.
5. Assuming username and password are accepted, the remote Mac’s screen is displayed.
As with any task I perform frequently, I wanted to shave some time off of this process but I didn’t want to save the screensharing authentication info to my keychain (personal preference).
Fortunately, there’s an easy way to pre-define the username for the screensharing login window by adding username@ to the vnc:// address:
vnc://username@computer_name_here.domain.com
The username should now be filled in when the screensharing login window appears.
Since you can also make bookmarks in the Connect to Server window, my next step was saving a bookmark for the updated screensharing address.
It’s simple enough to do, but not having to manually enter the username will save me at least a few seconds every time I connect to a remote machine’s screen.
