Beam

People who use multiple Macs, such as a build machine, a headless Mac mini, or a Mac in another room, typically rely on screen sharing to see what is happening on another machine. Screen sharing only hands over a static picture of an entire remote desktop, not an actual usable window with its own Dock icon or a place in Command-Tab. This makes it clunky to work across machines, drag files between them, or use a single app running elsewhere as if it were local. Headless Macs with no display or keyboard are especially hard to interact with using existing tools.

Beam shares individual windows (or whole screens) directly from one Mac to another, rendering them as real, native windows on the receiving Mac complete with Dock icons, Command-Tab presence, and working keyboard shortcuts. Resizing a beamed window resizes the real window on the source Mac, and dragging a file onto it moves the file to the other machine; audio from the shared app can also be toggled to play locally. Connections work over the same Wi-Fi network or, with Tailscale, across the internet, and windows can also be opened in a browser for devices without the app installed. The company states that windows, keystrokes, clipboard, and sound travel encrypted directly between Macs and are never seen by Beam's servers, and that hidden windows and password managers are excluded from sharing by design.