Barrier: Share mouse and keyboard between computers

Barrier has been forked to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;input-leap&#x2F;input-leap" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;input-leap&#x2F;input-leap</a> which has a hundred more commits by the same devs.<p>The name is still barrier though, has anyone more info about this fork?

Barrier looks great, but does anyone know why KVM switches with DisplayPort or HDMI are so outrageously expensive? It should just be a switch, no complex electronics, so I truly can&#x27;t figure out why any KVM should cost more than say $30-50 US.<p>I suspect DRM or patents for rent seekers are involved somehow. Or maybe they&#x27;re playing on the naivety of the business community towards this stuff. I&#x27;d sure like to know, and also if there are any low-cost or open source KVMs available.

I use this on my laptop and desktop when I bring my laptop into my office. It&#x27;s totally seamless. You tell Barrier where the laptop &quot;is&quot; (relative to your monitor array -- just like setting up a secondary monitor) and then when you scroll your mouse onto your laptop everything is totally seamless. Your mouse and keyboard are then used solely for the laptop until you move the mouse back onto one of your desktop monitors.<p>The only bug I experienced was that the Barrier <i>client</i> would infinitely connect until you set up where that client &quot;is&quot; (as above) on the server. This is a pretty well-known issue at this point, but it would be nice if Barrier would say a bit more about errors (instead of being stuck on &quot;Barrier is starting...&quot;). There&#x27;s a Show Log button in the File menu though which is nice.

Just an FYI for mac users: Universal Control is a native macOS alternative to barrier that&#x27;s about to debut with macOS 12.3 (currently in beta). As an ex-synergy user, let me just say how awesome the implementation is. What&#x27;s crazy is you can share your mouse and keyboard not only between two or more macs but also between your mac and an iPad (if you have one, obviously). And the latency is crazy unnoticably low (even over wifi).

I can&#x27;t install Barrier on my work laptop for policy reasons, but I don&#x27;t want to buy a KVM, so a project I&#x27;ve been interested in building when I have time is porting enough of the Barrier&#x2F;Synergy protocol to the Particle Photon [1] or BeagleBone Black [2] I&#x27;ve had lying around for a while, and then configuring it to emulate a keyboard and mouse via its USB gadget driver, allowing it to control my work laptop over USB.<p>On the Photon at least, emulating a keyboard and mouse is incredibly easy and is baked into the firmware, but implementing the Barrier protocol so that it can appear as a client on the network and pass on the keyboard&#x2F;mouse input seems like it&#x27;s going to take some effort.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.particle.io&#x2F;photon&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.particle.io&#x2F;photon&#x2F;</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;beagleboard.org&#x2F;black" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;beagleboard.org&#x2F;black</a>

Anyone else ever wanted multiple cursors and multiple mice on one computer? Sometimes I&#x27;d rather move my hand to a different mouse than drag the cursor across all that screen real estate. Also the different pointers would stay put when not in use.

How is this different from synergy ?<p>I used to use Synergy all the time before the computer got so powerful that I didn&#x27;t need multiple computers to drive all the monitors and run things in VMs

I tried Barriers to share mouse+keyboard between work and private laptop in the same wifi. Somehow, I had issues with linking both PC.<p>One of the alternatives is what I use currently - Microsoft Garage Mouse Without Borders ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;download&#x2F;details.aspx?id=35460" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;download&#x2F;details.aspx?id=354...</a> ) which suites my needs.<p>ps. using 5GHz wifi significantly reduces mouse latency.

Thanks for sharing, so awesome that someone did the fork of synergy to stay oss and free.<p>I was a big user of synergy 1 and was quite disappointed by the takeover that led to the current partially proprietary Synergy.<p>It was a slide, first &quot;let&#x27;s have a binary builds for paying users to fund the project&quot; then &quot;let&#x27;s have important features only for paid users with a license code needed&quot;, then the guys goal was to create and develop a company, hiring dev and assistants... The original spirit was lost.<p>This annoyed me a lot based on the fact that it was not the original developer of Synergy.<p>So, for long time I was thinking of doing a fork. And so, I&#x27;m very grateful that some people did it and had the courage to continue it.

This still requires a dedicated monitor connection to each box with a hardware or source switch, right? Or a screen per device? That is, the KVM (in the VGA days) used to switch the mouse, keyboard, and video source so a single monitor, keyboard, and mouse switches across devices. But barrier doesn&#x27;t try to solve that part, I think.<p>Modern HDMI KVM hardware switches seem rather expensive; anyone found a good way to &quot;switch&quot; the monitors as well as keyboard and mouse?

I tried using Barrier in a fairly complex setup (Linux, Windows, Mac with all of them being sometimes unavailable). Found some annoying UX issues (Windows privileged&#x2F;login screen kicks the mouse back into the original position on a different monitor) and more importantly the Linux machine would wedge itself with 100% CPU used by Barrier.<p>This is a nice tool but not yet production ready.

I&#x27;ve been using x2x <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dottedmag&#x2F;x2x" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dottedmag&#x2F;x2x</a> It&#x27;s really old and has it&#x27;s perks but it works for my setup.

I will soon have two macbooks on my desktop in front of me. I hope to use the older macbook to run background tasks, like uploading videos to youtube and as a third monitor.<p>I have keychron k1 keyboard and an mx master mouse. Keychron is currently connected to the USB hub due to led lights, latency. But the keyboard has a battery and can work off of bluetooth. Mouse is connected through the tiny dongle that comes with logitech mouses. Both Keyboard and Mouse claim to work off Bluetooth. Can I use this program to share the keyboard and mouse between the two macbooks? Or is using Bluetooth or a kvm switch a better option?

I use this daily between PC and Mac (as well as PC&#x2F;PC) and it is great. Much more stable than Synergy for me, with the only caveat that it gets confused if you change monitor setups on the fly.

I use barrier daily between my two laptops it take everywhere. it&#x27;s great, except I have two issues. you can it copy &#x2F;paste images between the two. and you cannot select which monitor the mouse moves off of.<p>I find myself wanting to copy screenshots between the two constantly, and if you have two monitors stacked vertically, I can pick the bottom monitor to be the edge monitor to go to my other computer.<p>I wish barrier devs were more active devs but it still works great

If you are on Windows, check out Input Director instead, in particular it works great if you have non rectangular monitor configurations.

It&#x27;s pretty good, only thing I&#x27;d recommend is to always use wired connection, performance using wifi is not very stable

If you are in Windows only environment you can use Mouse wthout Borders [0]<p>Works fine enough on WiFi, supports clipboard sync and file copy (but reliable only for small files).<p>(and if I remember it right I learned about it here in some thread about Synergy...)<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aka.ms&#x2F;mm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aka.ms&#x2F;mm</a>

This monitor with a built in KVM has been working well for me <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gigabyte.com&#x2F;Monitor&#x2F;M27Q" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gigabyte.com&#x2F;Monitor&#x2F;M27Q</a><p>I use two of them with Linux and Mac.

I love the look of this, but haven&#x27;t been able to find any information about latency... It seems to be a local network solution? Light on details about how it works, short of reading source.

Got this working on the 2.3.4 release branch. The 2.4.0 release has a critical error that hasn&#x27;t been fixed in months (years?) so definitely look into the issues page on that one.

Just don&#x27;t use it on any computer you play online games on. &quot;Anti cheat&quot; software tends to freak out on things like this.

Would be nice to have an Android client too!

Any tool that switches screens, too?<p>Essentially one terminal for <i>n</i> computers, with a hardware or software switch between them?

Didn&#x27;t synergy get there ages ago? Not saying it&#x27;s not impressive, but what is the advantage?

I&#x27;m using Synergy 1.x. Is this better in any way?

How does it compare to synergy?

is it better than sharemouse?

is it better than sharemouse ?