VMware Fusion 2 Keyboard Mapping in the Wild: Visual Studio Shortcuts Edition
Chris Chew is a .NET developer who recently switched to a MacBook Pro as his primary machine. Of course, because Visual Studio, the integrated development environment for .NET development, only runs on Windows, Chris is running Windows on his Mac using VMware Fusion 2.
Chris has a great blog post up about how he’s using VMware Fusion 2’s keyboard mapping functionality to access the “generate” Resharper shortcut—which requires “Alt + Insert,” two keys which don’t exist on the Mac. You can read more about it on the post.
And to learn more about VMware Fusion 2’s keyboard mapping feature, you can check out the video below.
And for people already using VMware Fusion’s keyboard mapping feature, how are you using it? For which applications and which keystrokes? Sound off in the comments!
Keyboard Mapping in VMware Fusion 2 from VMware Fusion on Vimeo.
I remap the apple cmd key to the control key. That way I don't get confused when switching back and forth between the Fusion VM and the host Mac system. Specifically, I was having problems with my use of firefox in the guest, since I use control-L and control-K all the time. Now it works great.
Posted by: Erik | October 29, 2008 at 12:35 PM
How can I generate “Num Pad +” and “Num Pad -” on the MacBook keyboard?
Posted by: Jan Dubois | October 29, 2008 at 04:35 PM
I use Ctrl+Right and Ctrl+Left when editing in Visual Studio and other text editors such as UltraEdit. But these keys also cause Spaces to move to the space on the right or space on the left. So I mapped Ctrl+Right to Ctrl+Right and Ctrl+Left to Ctrl+Left. Now I can use these keys within the GuestOS to edit text files without OS X moving to a different space.
Posted by: Kirby Turner | November 06, 2008 at 05:49 AM
Guess I was wrong in my previous comment. Mapping Ctrl+Right and Ctrl+Left works until I move out of the guest os. When I return to the guest os Ctrl+Right and Ctrl+Left are taken over by Spaces again. Oh well.
Posted by: Kirby Turner | November 06, 2008 at 06:36 AM
@Kirby What you need to do is disable the binding between the Ctrl-arrow keys and the "Move spaces" command.
This is done via the Mac's systems settings. Click on the system setting icon in your dock, and then click on the "Expose and Spaces" item.
Click on the "Spaces" tab, and then change the drop-down menu next to "To switch between spaces" to the [ - ] setting.
Now, ctrl-arrows will no longer be parsed by Mac OS X to mean "switch spaces."
Posted by: Pete Kazanjy | November 06, 2008 at 09:23 AM
@Peter Thanks for the tip. I gave it a try but I still like using ctrl+arrows to move between spaces. So I opted for yet another approach.
I left the "switch between spaces" setting to ctrl+arrows and I mapped option+arrows in Fusion to ctrl+arrows. So far this is working well for me. And as an added benefit now I can use the same key combination (option+arrows) to move between words in the different text editors I use in the Mac and Windows worlds (i.e., Visual Studio, UltraEdit, Xcode, and TextMate).
The blog posting on using keyboard mapping got me to explore this feature of Fusion more. I really like the level of control provided by Fusion. I'm sure I will be fine tuning my mappings more over time.
Posted by: Kirby Turner | November 06, 2008 at 10:59 AM
I used the feature recently with Visual Studio too - the "Build -> Cancel" command has Ctrl+Break shortcut by default and Mac had no Break key - so I added a mapping of Ctrl+Alt+Delete to Ctrl+Break and now I can cancel my builds early if I see some small and stupid error (which is great since the builds take a while to finish, and I prefer keyboard shortcuts to mouse). Also the Delete has a sense of "stop, restart", so it fits mentally well :-)
@Kirby: I use the "Ctrl+Alt+arrows" option in the Spaces settings to switch between spaces and am running Visual Studio fullscreen in Space 2, and can Ctrl+Left,Right to go a word left,right inside the VM without any problems.
Posted by: Boris Dušek | November 09, 2008 at 02:12 AM
@Jan: on MBP, you hit F6 to activate Numpad, then hit the "?" key, which in Numlock mode means "+" (and ":" for "-"). Not sure if it's like this on MB as well.
Posted by: Boris Dušek | November 09, 2008 at 02:16 AM
Love Fusion but Parallel 4 offers more then 2 cores.
Should it be possible with 2.1 updates on vmware ??
As I have an 8 core system...
And when using 3d studio max it could be useful...
Regards
Posted by: Valentijn Langendorff | November 12, 2008 at 12:42 PM
How do get windows function keys F1-F12 to work from the Mac keyboard?
Posted by: Ron Ray | March 25, 2009 at 01:49 PM
I remapped a whole lot of keyboard shortcuts for CorelDRAW (the whole reason I'm running Fusion). Turns out it was a big waste of time. If I even so much as enable keyboard mapping, I lose the ability to expand selections by pressing and holding shift (in [u]all[/u] applications. I hope I can find a fix for this, I really need my shortcuts!
Posted by: Pete | July 06, 2009 at 08:40 AM