Dead keys on host system prevent VMware guest from receiving keystrokes at all

[rrr rr]

I am running VMWare Fusion on MacOS with a Swedish keyboard. Since some time back, it appears that the dead keys on my keyboard don't register in the clients I run in VMware at all (these include ~, ^, `, and ´ which are physically between + and backspace on the numbers row, and to the right of å on the next row). For example, running xev in Debian 12 reveals that no event arrives when I press these keys in the guest OS.

This is rather crippling, as several of these characters are crucial for scripting (try to grep without ^, or opening ~/Desktop without ~)

I have an external USB keyboard which exhibits the additional symptom that the key to the left of Z generates § instead of < in the guest but this works correctly on the laptop's built-in keyboard so should probably be regarded as tangential.

I recently switched from an Intel Mac to a new M3 one so I can say with some confidence that the host architecture does not seem to matter.

If I install the English ABC keyboard and switch the host to use that, the dead keys start to work inside the VMware client, i.e. the keystrokes finally reach the client and work as expected. But this obviously requires me to install a second keyboard, switch to it, and then remember to switch back when I move the cursor to another window outside of VMware.

It was rather hard to find this forum in the first place; I hope this is an acceptable way to submit a bug report for this product.

[Erik Maaloe]

I have a similar problem with a Danish keyboard. I cannot enter for instance non-Danish letters in my Fusion guests like é or ö which I normally do by first pressing ´ and then e (or ¨+o). Here in my Mac host it works, but both in my Windows 11 guest and my Ubuntu 24.04 guest the results are only e and o, not é and ö.

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ErikM
Long-time VMware user
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[Erik Maaloe]

My problem has not been resolved with the VMware Fusion release 13.6.1. The keys ´`¨^~ (and maybe more) are still dead in my quest operating systems. I still cannot combine ´ and e to get é, among others. In Windows I have installed VMware Tools 12.4.5 (the latest version I think).

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ErikM
Long-time VMware user
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[Technogeezer]

The VMware Tools version isn't going to matter, since there's no keyboard driver present there. Windows will use a standard Microsoft keyboard settings. 

Some thoughts:

For Linux guests, see what keyboard mappings are available and see if they're handling the "dead" keys to generate a character. 

For Windows, I performed an experiment. My default keyboard is set to the standard US English keyboard. I couldn't get the accented characters to work. I then installed the US International keyboard and switched to it. Now keystroke combinations such as "`+e" generate the accented character. 

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- Paul (technogeezer)
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[Erik Maaloe]

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, it is correct that you can get accented characters by switching to US international keyboard. If you can find them without having the physical keyboard layout in front of you, which is a bit difficult. And then you don't have the special Danish characters like æ, ø and å. And many other characters are in other positions, again difficult to find without the physical keyboard layout.

But switching between keyboards is an interim solution, however awkward and slow.

And it did work in Fusion 13.5 and before, so it is a bug introduced in Fusion 13.6. And not fixed in 13.6.1.

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ErikM
Long-time VMware user
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[Carlos Carrascón]

I have the same problem,

I'm using Fusion 13.6.1 in my MacBook Pro; with Spanish keyboard in my host, keys like [ { ^ won't work with Spanish keyboard in my guest machines.

As Erik said in his message all keys work fine changing the host keyboard layout to any other language. This issue also began for me when i updated to version 13.6, everything was working fine for me before that.

[Frédéric Hardy]

Hi! Same problem here with "`" with Linux Fedora as guest mapped with French macintosh keyboard: "`" and according "£" are dead :/, the according keyboard event seems not to be received by guest. Hope a fix will be quickly available because it is very annoying.

[Sta Koul]

Just noticed this thread while I started another discussion. Have the same with greek language. I do not know  if it happened with 13.6 or 13.6.1 (I think I had installed 13.6 and then got notification for 13.6.1 update). In any case, my issue is that I cannot use accented letter in windows (windows 10 intel, windows 11 arm) when the host keyboard is greek as well.

[Frédéric Hardy]

Hi !

In my case, the keys come back after having disabled "host shortcuts" checkbox in VM preferences. But it is a workaround, because it is very annonying to not be able to switch to a host application using command-tab…

Best regards, Fred.

[Technogeezer]

@Frédéric Hardy that's an interesting observation. It makes me wonder if this issue is related to the removal of Unity support. Having command-tab work to switch windows between host applications and Unity-presented guest applications certainly would be beneficial when Unity is active. 

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- Paul (technogeezer)
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[Erik Maaloe]

I have disabled "host shortcuts" as suggested by Fred. It works for me, i.e. it has reenabled the accented characters. I haven't yet seen any problems or side effects since my quests run on a separate monitor. I don't think the command-tab key is only needed when running in Unity mode, but also if you need to switch to a host running behind your guest in a full screen one-monitor setup.

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ErikM
Long-time VMware user
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[Technogeezer]

Hmmm. I wonder if we can get anyone's attention from VMware/Broadcom on this to find out if this was an intentional change?

@Dhairya Tomar @Michael Roy can we get someone to look at this thread and comment about whether this was an intentional change or is it a bug?

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- Paul (technogeezer)
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[Rajeswara Reddy Kotla]

We have filed a bug for this issue and the team will be looking into it.

[rrr rr]

I struggled a bit to find the "host shortcuts" but I guess you mean the "Enable Mac OS Host Keyboard Shortcuts" checkbox on the Mac Host Shortcuts tab in the active Keyboard & Mouse profile.

Unchecking this certainly improves things in that keystrokes which previously did not register at all are now making it through from the host to the client, but not all of them produce the correct symbol (for example, shift and the key to the right of Å produces ' instead of ^, even though the unshifted key does now generate a dead ¨)

(I guess it's possible that some of the hacks I tried before are still active and mix up things for me.)

A definite drawback is that it is now very hard to get out of a full-screen client.