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VMware Enter Key


Category Sci & Tech
Tags mac vmware
This post was published on Saturday 16 August 2008.

I have recently taken the plunge and bought myself a Mac.   I love it - for a long-term Windows user there have been the inevitable confusions and frustrations (the weirdness of skipping/deleting entire words is STUPID - Ctrl-Arrow and Ctrl-Delete is so much easier and more sensible).

Anyway - one of my biggest frustrations was using VMware Fusion to run Windows.   Yes, I still have some applications that need Windows - not least Excel, which is absolutely awful in Mac compared to a PC.   And I discovered that the Enter key on the number pad simply will not work as an Enter key.

I spent ages looking for a solution, mapping keyboards in Windows etc etc, and finally I found this.   I believe it is in Italian, but the instructions are clear enough.   Shut down VMware Fusion and open this file in TextEdit:

~/Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/preferences

Then add this line to the bottom of the file:

pref.mapISONumpadEnterToAltGrEnabled = “FALSE”

Open VMware Fusion again, run Windows, and, hey presto, you have an Enter key again!   Of course, you won’t have an Alt Gr key, because that’s what VMware use the Enter key for by default.   Why they didn’t leave it as the right-hand side Alt key, I’ll never know.