Virtualbox + win10 virtual desktops

v-600

Senior member
Nov 1, 2010
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If I start a virtual machine on its own windows 10 desktop and then set it full screen, it takes over all mouse and keyboard input. Commands like ctrl+win+left/right go straight to the VM, not the host.

Is there an easy way to swap between the Windows 10 virtual desktops containing the normal win10 desktop and a fullscreen virtualbox desktop?

EDIT: Wasn't sure whether to put this in software or windows OS section.
 
Last edited:
Feb 25, 2011
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There's a "Host" key (usually left-control) that will work with certain combo keys to do things like switching in and out of fullscreen mode.
 

v-600

Senior member
Nov 1, 2010
488
3
76
I was playing round with the host key. Its seems to be primarily responsible for sending commands to virtualbox (host+f to get out of full screen) rather than for sending commands to the windows host.

The settings for alt-tab in the VirtualBox documentation might help. I'll play around and see what happens.

I was using Virtualbox on my mbp and osx intercept gestures much better. e.g. a 3 finger swipe always affects osx rather than a full screen guest. Hopefully I can tweak my window host similarly (its disjointing to swap between machines that behave differently).