Here are some suggestions to make the Shared Folders feature better in VMware Fusion (I'm using VMware 6.0.2):
- Allow me to see dot files, so that I can share e.g. the .ssh folder with a VM.
- Allow a Shared Folder to use a relative path name, such as ~/myfolder instead of /Users/john/myfolder.
These improvements would make our lives much easier, as our development team tends to share Linux VMs across developers. However, private credentials, such as SSH keys, should obviously not be shared. With VMware 6, we need to go through these hoops after downloading a VM image:
- Edit the Shared Folders, remove the ones that are relative to the home folder (as that is typically named differently on each host).
- Make dotfiles visible in the Finder using a Terminal command, restart the Finder.
- Show the correct folder in the Finder.
- In VMware, open the Shared Folders dialog, select the + button to add a new shared folder. Notice that the dot files are not visible in this select dialog.
- Go back to the Finder, drag the correct folder to the VMware select dialog
Even if only improvement #2 above would be implemented, then we would go from 5 steps down to 0 for this typical case.
