Horrible VMware keyboard shortcuts [closed]

Question

I'm a VMware user and far too often I use keyboard shortcuts while programming. However, this has proved to be quite distressing as sometimes the VMware gets hold of it and turns off / pauses (Ctrl+Z) the virtual machine.

Is there a way to disable keyboard shortcuts on VMware? Has anyone here ever found a workaround?

Answer 1

I use AutoHotKey (are you running VMWare on Windows ?) to disable certain shortcuts. You can find this tool here:

http://www.autohotkey.com/

It's open source and I quite like it. Can be used for automation tasks, but you can also have it respond differently to different windows. With some AHK scripting, I think you should be able to fix your problem.

The site had got loads of tutorials too on writing handy scripts.

Good luck.

Answer 2

If it is Ok for you - here's a bit of hacky solution which is very simple - just use ResHacker program to get rid of those annoying accelerators (they are defined as resources in vmware.exe).

Answer 3

This was very annoying to me as well. I finally resolved it for me by doing the following:

1. Open the VMWare Workstation preferences (Edit menu | Preferences)
2. Select the Input tab
3. Check the "Grab keyboard and mouse input on key press" option.

This way, if your mouse drifts outside the virtual machine's window, when you type someting, the virtual machine will "regain" focus.