These profiles specify how Mac key combinations and mouse shortcuts are mapped to shortcuts on a virtual machine, including key combinations for Windows 8 shortcuts.

With keyboard and mouse profiles, you can also specify whether keyboard shortcuts are sent to your Mac instead of the virtual machine, and you can specify which Fusion-specific keyboard shortcuts to enable.

Although you can also create and edit keyboard and mouse profiles in Fusion preferences, you use virtual machine settings to select which profile to use for a particular virtual machine.

You can edit the default profiles provided by Fusion, or you can create additional profiles, either by adding a new one or by duplicating and editing one of the existing profiles.

  • Profile maps common Macintosh key combinations such as Command key+C and Command key+X to their Windows and Linux counterparts, such as Control+C and Control+X, respectively.
  • Mac Profile has very few keyboard mappings. Most keystrokes are passed directly to the macOS guest.
  • Windows 8 Profile has a set of key mappings specifically for Windows 8 features, such as pressing Windows-C to open the Charms bar.

    Fusion includes a Windows 8 specific profile because many keyboard shortcuts specific to Windows 8 include the Windows key, which normally maps to the Command key key on macOS. Unfortunately, many of these Command key key combinations are also used for system hot keys in macOS. To avoid conflicts, the Windows 8 profile allows you to use the key combination Command key+shift to map to the Windows key in Windows 8. You can, however, configure a different key combination.