VMWare rant about Ctrl-Z

Posted December 26th, 2007 in VMWare

VMWare's virtualisation products are great. But I have one thing I need to have a rant about. The "suspend" function uses the Ctrl+Z keyboard shortcut and there doesn't seem to be any way to be able to change it. If there is, suggestions about how to change it are welcome.

Ctrl+Z is commonly used as the "Undo" shortcut (with Ctrl+Shift+Z or Ctrl+Y often used as "redo"), and I find myself frequently using the Ctrl+Z key to undo stupid typing mistakes I have made when writing content for blogs, or code for a software or web application.

Somehow, I occasionally manage to trigger the shortcut key which pulls focus out of the virtual machine while I'm typing, just before I'm about to hit Ctrl+Z. And great... the virtual machine goes into suspend mode. This can take around three minutes depending which virtual machine I'm using and then I have to activate it again, which can take a similar amount of time. This is a real pain when you're in the middle of typing a sentence...

So if anyone knows a way to either reassign the shortcut key, or disable it entirely, then I'd love to know.