Parallels Desktop has almost no hotkeys defined, and this is a good (and hopefully intentional) thing. Hotkeys defined in the application have the potential to conflict with hotkeys used in the VM. However, I think they missed a few hotkeys. Under the application menu, there are still cmd-', cmd-H, opt-cmd-H, and cmd-Q. Some of these are causing conflicts for me. Parallels developers, could you please either turn them off, or provide an option to do so?
In OSX's System Preferences, under System open the Universal Access settings and then enable the acces for assistive devices at the bottom, that should then pass through all keypresses to Parallels. Personally I have mine switched off so I can use Expose to get in and out of the VM quickly.
Thanks for the reply. I've already got that option turned on, and I've never seen it have any effect on hot keys used by an application, nor has it limited my use of exposé. The problem isn't that Parallels is missing some keypresses, but that the Parallels app is intercepting some keypresses and not passing them to the VM.
Well, I've worked around this by setting in keyboard prefs the hotkey for "Preferences..." to the improbable combination of shift-control-option-command-`. So at least it won't bother me anymore. But I still think it should be fixed. Also, I found a few places online that explained how to unset a shortcut key for an application by modifying its preferences file. To unset the above mentioned key, I should be able to use: defaults write com.parallels.desktop NSUserKeyEquivalents -dict-add "Preferences..." "nil" But unfortunately, this does not work. Instead of turning off the shortcut key altogether, it sets it to 'n'. I tried substituting "" for "nil" to no effect.
you can edit the preferences file with either a text editor (if you're careful) or Apples Preference File Editor (part of xcode). Just remove the key.
That only works if the key is in the file to begin with. I don't believe most application shortcut keys are defined in preference files, only the ones that the user adds later through System Preferences. Most application shortcut keys are defined in the application itself, or more specifically, in the nib file.
