The part that caught me off guard is the clipboard. Text copied on the Windows machine pastes straight into the terminal on the Raspberry Pi, alongside a cursor that drifts between the two screens from right to left. All of this happens with no hardware switch box on the desk, just an open-source KVM program called Barrier doing the work in software.
The build is refreshingly simple. Barrier runs as a server on the Windows PC, registered under the screen name GORDON-DELL, and as a client on the Pi. In the server configuration a second screen is added to the left and labelled raspberrypi. On the Pi side, a setup wizard handles the client settings, an SSL fingerprint dialog gets accepted, and the link is made. Installation is a single terminal command on the Pi, while Windows gets version 2.3.2 of the installer from the project's GitHub page.
Several details stand out. Barrier finds the Windows server on its own through Bonjour and Avahi, and in my view that auto-discovery is the friendliest part of the whole setup. Once connected, the tool sits in the background on both systems, and the spare keyboard that was on the desk during setup gets taken away, leaving one mouse and keyboard to drive the Windows PC and the Pi. The desk keeps two monitors, one per machine, with the Pi housed in a small red-and-white case. Screen positions can also be rearranged later in the server settings.
One caveat worth knowing: the maker has pointed out that some touchscreen configurations switch the mouse cursor off by default, so it is worth checking that setting if a touch display is part of the plan.
Project by Raspberry Pi. Watch it on their YouTube channel: