Barrier: Share mouse and keyboard between computers

I use this on my laptop and desktop when I bring my laptop into my office. It's totally seamless. You tell Barrier where the laptop "is" (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.

The only bug I experienced was that the Barrier client would infinitely connect until you set up where that client "is" (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 "Barrier is starting..."). There's a Show Log button in the File menu though which is nice.

You don't strictly need a local network, you could probably get it to work across a VPN. As long as you can get a TLS connection directly between the two devices.

In my experience the protocol is quite light on the network, because this directly influences where the cursor is on your screen you probably want to keep latency down as much as possible.

How is this different from synergy ?

I used to use Synergy all the time before the computer got so powerful that I didn't need multiple computers to drive all the monitors and run things in VMs

I use this daily between PC and Mac (as well as PC/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.

> How is this different from synergy ?

It's a fork of an older version of Synergy before they changed their license.