Dell U3818DW KVM Switching between Linux and MacOS

By thomas, 23 March, 2026

I upgraded my monitor for a U3818DW, which has a built in KVM. Changing between the inputs is a little annoying using the buttons on the monitor, so I configured a keyboard shortcut on Linux and MacOS to switch back and forth.

On Linux, I went to Keyboard shortcuts and assigned a custom shortcut to:

ddcutil setvcp 60 0x12

This will swap my input to the Mac, to go back I used the Shortcuts app to run m1ddc, which I installed from brew.

In shortcut, I setup a shortcut that does a Run Shell Script with the following:

/opt/homebrew/bin/m1ddc display 2 set input 17

(The builtin display is display 1).

This way I can swap between the Mac and my Fedora machine using just the keyboard.  The KVM works very well and even allows me to share the webcam between the two machines.