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It is very annoying that when my mouse cursor leaves the window of my VMWare Player, it losts focus and I can't type anymore (lots of wasted energy).
So I checked if I could modify the input settings and found this documentation:
It shows that I can change the Input settings but it is for a very old version (v4) and I couldn't find any preference like this in my Player, I have only this:
How can I set these in my Player?
Nestor
Posted 2016-08-13T10:13:07.917
Reputation: 633
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That documentation is actually for VMware Workstation, not for VMware Player. (VMware confusingly renamed Workstation to "Workstation Pro" and Player to "Workstation Player".)
Workstation and Player share the same preferences file, so changing preferences in one usually affects the other product, even if that other product doesn't provide UI to change certain options. You could try manually modifying your %APPDATA%\VMware\preferences.ini file and adding pref.motionUngrab = "FALSE".
Alternatively uninstalling the VMware mouse driver in the guest should work too.
(Note that doing the above will prevent the mouse cursor from leaving the guest without doing an explicit ungrab; it will not allow you to move the mouse out of the guest while still being grabbed, which usually doesn't make much sense. If you want to be able to move the mouse out of the guest but to automatically grab when typing while the host window still has focus, you'll want to enable grab-on-keypress by setting pref.grabOnKeyPress = "TRUE" in the preferences.ini file.)
jamesdlin
Posted 2016-08-13T10:13:07.917
Reputation: 1 973
That documentation is actually for VMware Workstation, not for VMware Player. (VMware confusingly renamed Workstation to "Workstation Pro" and Player to "Workstation Player".) Anyway, see: http://superuser.com/questions/1044034/moving-the-mouse-cursor-out-of-vm-stops-keyboard-input-in-that-vm
– jamesdlin – 2016-08-14T13:16:17.637@jamesdlin Thanks, I'll try it. However, you described a scenario about how weird it would be if VMWare wouldn't release the mouse when it is out of the guest. Well, VirtualBox handles it very smoothly, if the mouse is out of the window but the focus is still on the VM, it doesn't release the hook, but if you click on a host window, it releases. Very intelligent solution, VMWare should work the same. – Nestor – 2016-08-15T06:52:23.110
Enabling "Grab keyboard and mouse input on key press" (
pref.grabOnKeyPress = "TRUE"in the preferences.ini file) should behave fairly similarly. If that's still insufficient, I'd be really curious to know what your use case is. – jamesdlin – 2016-08-15T07:17:27.900@jamesdlin Using
grabOnKeyPressis very close to the experience I had on VirtualBox. If they manage to retain the mouse cursor at its original (out of window) position, they catch up with the Oracle guys :) If you promote your comment to an answer, I'll accept it. – Nestor – 2016-08-15T17:56:23.163