No Money, No KVM, No Mess
So here is a strange scenario I found myself in;
Two monitors, two PC's, one hub (a Lenovo Thunderbolt dock), one keyboard and one mouse.... and a very small table to work on. Wellll, irrespective of the size of the table, I wanted to use one mouse, one keyboard and no additional hardware (neither a KVM switch nor any fancy, read expensive multi device keyboard mouse combo) (for those who might be thinking, "Is he an idiot?", the hag would say, "Of Course he is you dimwit!").
To complicate the matter, one of the PC's is a work device, which is on VPN all the time using something called 'Global Whatnot We are Watching you' (nevermind the question of who exactly is being protected here), so the hundreds of software KVM tools out there would most likely not work or needed significant investment (as in Not Free).
Enter, Microsoft Garages' 'MouseWithoutBorders'! (MWB, hereforth, my abbreviation not theirs)
Some tweaking, badabingbadaboom, We are sharing keyboards, moving mice, copy/paste, drag and drop and all kinds of goodies!
But hold on! Did we not want to use two monitors too? I mean, yes, I have dual monitors but I did want all that screen real estate for the PC I was working on, not split the screens across two PC's. Here, MWB does not claim any fame. So what to do?
Was it all an exercise in futility?
Oh No No No! Enter the Israeli swashbuckler (my description not his) Nir Sofer and his fantabulous freeware tool, 'ControlMyMonitor'! (CMM, hereforth, my abbriveation not his) What a guy!
CMM, allows you to send signals to the connected monitors allowing you to do fun stuff like adjust the various properties without entering the oft fiddly menus on-screen. But hold on, one of the vaules it exposes is the MonitorID!. Enter one monitors ID and boom you are on that screen. Enter the other monitors ID and boom, there you are.
A little script (.bat, Windoze Zindabad) and what we have is a fully software controlled multiPC multiMonitor mono-keyboard adn mono-mouse setup. Most importantly, totally free.