Thursday, August 23, 2007

VMWare Fusion for Mac

Well it turns out that VMWare took down their offer of VMWare Fusion for half price two days early. I was going to buy it but like many things procrastinated too long and didn't get the price break and it didn't help that they didn't honor the date they set forth. I would have complained but then they have a $20 off rebate. I don't like rebates, nor do I count on them, but it turns out their own website flat out failed to accept my key for the last few days. I'll let you all know what happens with that. I sent an email off but I figure I'll keep trying. You can claim your rebate here.

Two things I find really annoying with VMWare Fusion:

- When I shutdown my Mac and VMWare is running in any capacity it cancels the shutdown.

- ALT + Tab and CTRL + Tab don't get sent to the current process to handle. This is annoying when running applications like Delphi and Remote Desktop. It means more mousing which I'm trying to avoid.

5 comments:

Pat Lee said...

To enable Ctrl and Alt tab to be sent to the virtual machine instead of the being used as global keyboard shortcuts, go to Preferences in VMware Fusion and disable the two keyboard and mouse preferences. This will mean that all hotkeys are sent to virtual machine. Hope that helps

Chris Bensen said...

Hi Pat,

Thanks for the pointer. I set that setting and it still doesn't send them to the remote client in all cases. The only way time it does seem to work is when connecting to the remote client and going full screen the those keys do get sent to the remote client. One problem with setting those settings is I need F10 and F11 to be sent to the VM so I can run certain apps.

Anonymous said...

I'm using Fusion daily for Delphi development and I prefer it over the Remote Desktop options. I have the keyboard option (Enable Mac OS keyboard shortcuts) turned off and the mouse option (Enable Mac OS mouse shortcuts) turned on. When I'm using the MacBook Pro keyboard I find I have to hold down the fn key to make certain function keys works in the Windows guest OS (fn+F5). I don't have to do this when using the bluetooth keyboard. F1 through F12 work as expected.

Only trick I have not figured out is how to use the Ctrl key to multi-select listbox items. It works with the mouse option turned off, but I prefer to leave the mouse option turned on so I can access the popup context menu in various applications.

By the way, I believe changes to the VMware preferences for the keyboard and mouse take effect after guest OS is restarted.

Anonymous said...

Correction to my previous comment: It seems changes to the VMware preferences take effect immediately.

Also, I solved my Ctrl+Mouse Click problem. I disabled the mouse option in the VMware preferences and I enabled the "Place two fingers on the trackpad and click button for secondary click" option found in at Apple icon > System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Trackpad.

Now I can Ctrl+Click list items to select multiples, and 2-finger the trackpad+Click to simulate a right mouse click.

Patrick said...

Yippeeeee....Great advise for the Ctrl multiselect people....thanks a stack

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