How to Change or Disable Hot-Key for VMWare Player?

Question

I'm running VMWare for some older design apps that can only run on Windows XP. One of those apps uses "CTRL-ALT" and "CTRL-ALT-SHIFT" shortcuts to perform various tasks.

The issue is that VMWare player uses "CTRL-ALT" as a hotkey to grant control back to host OS.

Is there a way to disable this or change it?

Answer 1

I was having the same problem, and a little research led me to this article on the VMWare site

It shows how to modify the preferences.ini file to make the hotkey CTRL+ALT+SHIFT, and indicates that other key combinations can also be set. CTRL+ALT+SHIFT was fine for me so I tried that and it works:

Purpose

This article provides steps to customize the hot key preferences in VMware Server 2.0.

Resolution

The Remote Console does not provide an interface control to set the hot key settings. You must configure hot keys in the user preferences files.

To configure hot keys in the user preferences file: 

Note: If you have other VMware products installed, these changes affect the preferences of those products as well. 

1. Open the preferences file in a text editor.

The file is located in one of the following locations:

◦ %AppData%\VMware\preferences.ini

◦ ~/.vmware/preferences

1. Add the following lines to the file:

pref.hotkey.gui = "false" pref.hotkey.shift = "true" pref.hotkey.control = "true" pref.hotkey.alt = "true"

This combination sets the hot keys to CTRL + ALT + Shift . Other settings yield different combinations.

1. Save the file and restart the Remote Console.

Answer 2

if you change VMX-file parameters (preferences.ini - settings), you can do what you want...

pref.hotkey.shift = "true"    
pref.hotkey.alt = "true"    
pref.hotkey.control = "true"

pref.hotkey.disableExitFullScreenOnHotkeyRelease
pref.hotkey.disableHotkeyDelete
pref.hotkey.disableHotkeyEscape
pref.hotkey.disableHotkeyInsert
pref.hotkey.leftAlt
pref.hotkey.leftControl
pref.hotkey.leftShift
pref.hotkey.rightAlt
pref.hotkey.rightControl
pref.hotkey.rightShift

In Linux-VMs you may not like the usual CTRL + ALT combination - use this for CTRL + ALT + SHIFT

you can find detail information here for getting some control