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Interacting with the Virtual Machine

Click 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 as well as on first click. (See Input Preferences.)

Once the VMware has control of 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 release 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.

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

the virtual machine sees whereas VMware processes and absorbs the escape down and up. Typing control-alt-space prevents the next key down from being processed by VMware as a special key. Therefore, in the sequence VMware processes the space key and does not process the escape key, so the virtual machine sees

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