Using Multiple Machines at Once with a Single Keyboard and Mouse (KVM Setup)

When you have to work across multiple machines, swapping the keyboard and mouse back and forth is an incredibly tedious chore. There are devices like this that you might see in a server room , but they are expensive.

There is a utility that solves this problem in software.

That utility is barrier, which was built by forking Synergy.

The setup is simple. Install barrier on each of your machines, choose one of them to act as the server, and launch barrier on it. Connect the keyboard and mouse to the server. Then launch barrier as a client on the remaining machines. Now you can share the keyboard and mouse across multiple machines. The clipboard is even shared too.

It works well with almost zero config. Connections between different OSes also work just fine.

To use a Windows keyboard properly(?) on macOS, a little configuration is needed. The settings I use are as follows.

Win	mac
Ctrl	control
Win	option(alt)
Alt	command

To set up the mapping as shown above, just add the following content to the configuration file.

# Barrier.sgc
section: screens
	macOS.local:
		alt = super
		super = alt
# blah blah    

Now it works well. The end!