How to easily configure your MacBook keyboard in VMware Fusion (mapping)

No doubt about it, MacBook is a great laptop. However and even if Mac OS X is also a good system. I personally need a virtual machine with Microsoft Windows. It can be a Windows 7 or a Windows 8, it doesn’t matter but I need Windows for the few applications that I cannot install on my MacBook and for which there is no alternative.

I don’t know why but last time I get troubles when I wanted to set up the keyboard of my MacBook in VMware Fusion. I perfectly understand that some characters such as brackets or parenthesis must be obtained by pressing specific combinations of keyboard keys : Ctrl, Fn, Alt, Cmd because there are not, by default, visible, on the keyboard.

However, I want to be able to use all the keyboards keys in the same way in Mac OS X and Windows !

A few years ago, on Windows XP, I used to have the following driver that perfectly worked : http://www.funkydata.net/2008/04/pilote-clavier-apple-francais.html.  Unfortunately, this one does not work in Windows 7 or Windows 8 anymore.

I was thinking that with Windows 7, Windows 8 and the new version of VMware Fusion this problem was solved directly by VMware. And it seems that this is indeed the case (for most of people I know). But, for unknown reasons, I tried with Windows 8 or Windows 7 and I was not able to use all the keys of my MacBook keyboard in Windows.

After a few research, I found this video that solved my problem. 🙂

The idea is simple : we will use the official Apple drivers that are normally used in BootCamp ! 🙂

• Fist, grab the tools on the Apple web site at the following page : https://www.apple.com/fr/support/bootcamp/.
• Then, you click on the Download button.
• Download the last package version of BootCamp tools. You will get a Zip File. Put in on your virtual Windows machine and uncompress it.
• Now, you go to the folder BootCamp/Drivers/Apple and you will see a file called « BootCamp.msi« .
• Right-click on this file and run it with administrator privileges (select « Run as administrator« ) or open a CMD prompt in the same way (run as admin) and execute the following command msiexec /i BootCamp.msi.

The installation can take a few minutes depending on your MacBook configuration.

Once it’s done, restart the virtual machine and voilà, you MacBook pro keyboard now works with Windows in VMware Fusion.

If it’s not the case, you may have to manually select in the regional settings (in Panel Control) the « French (Apple) » keyboard (but select the language that suits to you with the (Apple) at the end).

One more thing, when you will restart your virtual machine, you will have some BootCamp options near the clock in the Windows taskbar. This tool is useful when you really used BootCamp. However, it’s not the case here so you can stop the service in services.msc and just stop the start of this service in « msconfig.exe » in Windows.

The next (and last) restart you will get all the drivers for your MacBook Pro on the Windows virtual machine, including keyboard, bluetooth, etc.

Hope this helps ! If it’s not clear or you need more details, please let me know in the comments ! 🙂