Opened 7 years ago
#17313 new enhancement
Feature: Keyboard scancode translation
| Reported by: | mcandre | Owned by: | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Component: | other | Version: | VirtualBox 5.1.30 |
| Keywords: | Cc: | ||
| Guest type: | OSX Server | Host type: | other |
Description
Most modern keyboards use IBM scancodes, and so VirtualBox users are likely to get fairly consistent behavior when sending these scancodes to just about every VM, via VBoxManage controlvm <vm> keyboardputscancode <hexpair>... However, macOS guest VM's use a different scancode set, one for Apple keyboards. This does not present a problem for most graphical VirtualBox users, however it does break some things for command line driven systems such as packer.io. In particular, systems like packer that are built on top of VirtualBox and want to send key codes to macOS VM's are faced with the nuisance of performing scancode translation. I propose that VirtualBox offer a VM configuration option like:
VBoxManage modifyvm <VM> --fromscancodes ibm --toscancodes apple
or similar flag syntax, that declares that VirtualBox should automatically remap scancodes sent via VBoxManage controlvm <VM> keyboardputscancode <hexpair>..., relieving packer and other tools from having to worry about such low level details (packer could then simply use IBM scancodes all the time).
I've also filed a ticket with packer to select more appropriate scancode sets for different kinds of VM's:
https://github.com/hashicorp/packer/issues/5635
As a mac user, I really don't care which of these is implemented, I just want to be able to use macOS guest VM's without having to hack around keyboard incompatibility issues!
