Sticky Shift+Arrow keys in CentOS guest

heathmorgan — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 22:25:32 GMT

I am running VMWare Workstation Pro 16.2.4, with a CentOS 8 linux guest. Inside the guest, when I hold Shift+Left Arrow or Shift+Right Arrow, the presses repeat beyond when I release the arrow key. Sometimes for 0.1 seconds, sometimes for what appears to be up to a second beyond the release. If I do not hold the shift key, the arrow keys stop repeating instantly upon release. This makes editing quite cumbersome.

Some information I have collected:
* I have not exhaustively tested all key combinations, but shift+arrows are the only keys that I've noticed this behavior for.
* This behavior does not happen inside my host (which is running Windows 11). In my host, the keypresses stop repeating instantly regardless of shift being held.
* I've verified this same behavior regardless of if I'm using a Desktop/GUI screen in CentOS 8, or just text mode (no GUI installed).
* I've tried having the VMWare Enhanced Keyboard Driver installed, and also not installed on my host.
* In the guest, I've used the tool evtest tool to verify kernel events inside the /dev/input/by-path/*event-kbd to verify that kernel events are continuing past release of the arrow key when shift is pressed.
* If I ssh into the guest, the keypresses do not continue past release, even the shift key is held.

All of this information makes me believe there's something wrong with how VMWare is passing the keyboard arrow input when the shift key is held. I will experiment with some other Linux distributions and/or versions to see if this is common across distributions, however my goal is some personal development work within CentOS.

Does anybody have any ideas for how to debug/fix this?

Re: Sticky Shift+Arrow keys in CentOS guest

Keeska — Sun, 02 Apr 2023 02:40:21 GMT

I "upgraded" from 15.5 to 17 and now having the same problem in Fedora guests.

The PCs with 15.5 do not exhibit the problem but the ones upgraded to 17 do. I see that you are using 16.4 so this is obviously a long standing problem which VMWare has not fixed.

Uninstalling version 17 and going back to 15.5 appears to be the only fix.

topic Sticky Shift+Arrow keys in CentOS guest in VMware Workstation Pro Discussions

Sticky Shift+Arrow keys in CentOS guest

Re: Sticky Shift+Arrow keys in CentOS guest