I bought a used Thinkpad to replace my long-lived but now-dead netbook, and while it’s a much better machine in relative terms, it’s still kind of a weenie compared to the Mac on my desk. It’ll be a fine coding/email/browsing device, but I have this fantasy of remoting in to the Mac, using the Thinkpad as a dumb terminal, so I can also drive Xcode from afar. I’ve set my desk up to be as comfortable a coding station as I can manage, but there are many other places I’d like to be as well…

My question for the interwebs: is it possible to set up a VNC server on a Mac such that there is no way to log in with a password, that authentication is only possible through some pre-set key pair? I know that one can do this sort of thing with Git but I am hazy on the details. I imagine that I would generate a file, copy it onto the laptop via USB stick, set some configuration somewhere, open the relevant port on my home router, and then control my desktop machine without worrying that it is protected by something so flimsy as a password.