Low-level clipboard feature via key commands

[Arcus92]

I was playing around with a lot of CentOS test systems lately and i noticed that the installer and the system doesn't support the shared clipboard feature.

While i was typing the endless repourl i had an idea : There should be a low-level clipboard feature that just sends the key commands of the host clipboard text to the guest system. Just like some evil keyboard usb dongles.

And yes. This will only work for simple text content and you could just switch to a ssh console after the installation but it would still improve the installation workflow for some terminal-only systems and setups or even some ancient windows versions. For simple english text without umlauts this should work for all guests. Maybe we could add an option to setup the guests keyboard mapping but it should match the hosts keyboard mapping in 99,99% of all cases.

The button fits perfectly in the Input->Keyboard menu and there should be a nice shortcut to access the feature (e.g. [host]+v).

I hope you liked that idea too.

[michaln]

As soon as someone writes the reams of code required to do this, it's going to be there.

For anyone who thinks this is trivial, here's a suggestion: Try doing it. You will quickly see how wrong you were.

You can also play around with VBoxManage controlvm subcommands keyboardputscancode, keyboardputstring, and keyboardputfile.

[socratis]

As mpack mentioned, this feature has been implemented with 5.2.0. See a small how-to in a post of mine in the thread "Input -> Keyboard -> Paste as text (send characters)". You should actually read the whole thread. In fact, I considered temporarily merging your thread with that one...