Universal host-to-guest paste

[pylo]

VirtualBox currently provides a shared clipboard feature. However, this has some shortcomings:

• It requires the installation of a graphical server -> clipboard is non-functional in any CLI-only environment, like servers
• It assumes that the guest additions have been already ported to your guest -> clipboard is non-functional in some guests, like OpenBSD
• It requires the installation of extra software, the guest additions -> sometimes people just don't want to or can't

I propose a VirtualBox feature to enable universal host-to-guest text pasting. It is possible to do this without guest support, in a way such that it would work on any guest.

Suggested implementation:

1. To activate pasting, user has to click VirtualBox menu item Input->"Paste to guest". This would be a new menu item added for this feature. In addition (for better ease of use), a Host-key combination can also be reserved for this.
2. Upon activation, VirtualBox reads any text content from the host clipboard, and sends each character through the virtual keyboard to the guest as if entered by the user manually.
3. Optionally, "Paste to guest" could detect if the guest has guest additions with a working clipboard, and only fall back to this new feature if not.

The only complexity that can arise is that the virtual keyboard might not be able to handle all characters. VirtualBox should know the layout of the attached virtual keyboard (this can be made settable through the already existing VM Input Settings), and translate characters from the clipboard to keys and key-combinations through the layout. Untranslatable characters would be ignored.

Limitation: Pasting text this way would mostly not work for some asian languages, or for some latin characters if keyboard layout is wrongly set. I argue though that servers around the world use mostly ASCII-only characters (sometimes extended, but mostly basic ASCII), so for a very large user base would still be extremely useful.

[Socratis]

Duplicate of:

• 2008-01-31, #1139 : Feature request: wider copy/paste support, in Console for instance
• 2009-02-07, #3293 : Genereal text paste support (host->guest)
• 2011-07-24, #9291 : [feature-request] Guest Additions: Please provide clipboard copy paste for text-mode console VMs (without X.org)
• 2016-01-12, #15031 : Add menu item to type/insert clipboard contents to keyboard
• 2016-04-30, #15372 : Let users paste plain text as keystrokes

As you can see it's a popular and old request. Take also a look at a recent discussion in the forums: ​https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=80315 which actually sparked some movement in the source tree after that, but I can't find the reference at the moment...

If you had only searched for copy/paste, we'd have one less duplicate ticket... :)

TO THE ADMINS: You might as well close #15031.

[Valery Ushakov]

#1139

PS: Thanks!