Physical keyboard mapping?

[f-laurens]

I run VirtualBuddy on a MacBook Pro M1 with a french keyboard (ISO layout - 79 keys):

• when running on the physical machine: here is my keyboard as shown by Keyboard Viewer: this perfectly matches the physical keyboard:

• but here it is when running in a virtual machine: it looks like VirtualBuddy thinks I have a US keyboard (US layout - 78 keys):

Is this a bug/restriction in the Apple virtualisation framework, or is this something that might be configurable in VirtualBuddy?

[insidegui]

Did you set the correct keyboard layout in System Preferences within the VM OS?

The virtual machine is pretty much like another computer, so your settings from macOS won't automatically apply to the macOS running in the virtual machine.

[f-laurens]

Did you set the correct keyboard layout in System Preferences within the VM OS?

I sure did.
As you can see from the screenshots above, an AZERTY (French), not QWERTY (US), logical layout was selected in the preferences (both on physical machine and on VM).
The problem is with the physical layout, which does not match the physical keyboard (see for example the layout of the left shift key and of the return key, and the lack of '@' key). It looks like the Virtualisation framework (or its configuration) assumes the physical machine has a US keyboard.

[f-laurens]

When looking at this: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/keyboards_and_pointing_devices, it looks like (unless I'm missing something...) there is indeed no way to define the physical layout of the virtual keyboard.
In this case, the observed behaviour would definitely be a bug in the Apple virtualisation framework, which implicitly assumes a US keyboard physical layout for the virtual keyboard, whereas it should use the physical layout (US or ISO) of the host machine's keyboard.
Then (not being myself a registered developer, I don't know how to do this but...) a bug report should be filed at Apple for this.

[f-laurens]

Definitely. BTW you can file feedback without being a developer, pretty sure anyone with an Apple ID has access to Feedback Assistant.

Thanks for the tip.

If you manage to do that, feel free to post the details and feedback ID here so that others can duplicate it.

Done... This is feedback ID FB10809588 .

[ltkn]

I've also raised a feedback. In the meantime as a workaround I've moved/remaped #@ to <> keys and to get >< I remapped them to shift+option > and option >.

the rationale was that @# are more frequently used.

the tool for this is https://software.sil.org/ukelele/ it works well in both Monterey and Ventura

[f-laurens]

I've also raised a feedback.

I'd be interested to know if you ever get any feedback from Apple on your feedback...
... For my part I got none so far.

[benoitsan]

Probably a good news: I see that Apple has added VZMacKeyboardConfiguration to the virtualization framework in macOS Sonoma. I suspect that it will fix the issue.

VZMacKeyboardConfiguration Documentation

[jeremybdk]

Seems interesting, I have a French Mac keyboard, and the system recognise it as an US keyboard, so I cannot type lots of characters like @ or # for example when using the VM

This is the Mac French layout on my Mac:

This is the Mac French layout in the VM

If anyone has figured out a solution to force the proper layout in the VM it would be great