Click or type in the virtual machine window to direct keyboard and mouse input to the virtual machine. The virtual machine must be powered on.
You can choose to trigger input grabbing on first keystroke or on first click. (See Input Preferences.)
Once the VMware has grabbed the keyboard and the mouse, all keystrokes, mouse moves, and mouse button clicks go to the virtual machine (or are processed by VMware as special commands).
To ungrab input, type control-alt-escape.
Also, when running just one virtual machine, typing control-alt-F8 takes it into full-screen mode. When running several virtual machines, typing control-alt-F8 into any of them switches the first virtual machine into full-screen mode, typing control-alt-F9 switches the second virtual machine into full-screen mode, and so on. This is an easy way to go from one virtual machine to another. (The exact function key used to switch to a virtual machine depends on your host machine configuration. Specifically, when a virtual machine starts it reserves the first available virtual terminal. With a typical Linux installation, the X server uses virtual terminal 7, and the next available one is virtual terminal 8. Hence the first virtual machine has virtual terminal 8.)
To type any of the VMware special keys (control-alt-escape, control-alt-insert, control-alt-F8, etc.) into the virtual machine without being processed by VMware, precede it with control-alt-space. For example, typing control-alt-space followed by escape (without releasing control and alt) sends control-alt-escape to the virtual machine. To send control-alt-space to the virtual machine, type control-alt-space space.
To be precise, a keystroke is really two events: key down and key up. VMware processes certain key down events as special commands when control and alt are also held down. The virtual machine does not see the key events for the special key, but it does see the control and alt events. For example, in the key sequence