Tilde key not working in VMware fusion

Problem:

Today I ran into a small but frustrating problem. The tilde key (~) didn’t work on my VMware fusion machine.

Situation:

I run Windows 10 in VMware fusion on a Macbook Pro. I searched a bit around the internet but didn’t find the right solution. By the way, my keyboard layout is US, so the ‘~’ key should be on the key just left from the ‘1’.
Some trial and error with keyboard combination with CTRL, ALT, Winkey etc didn’t work out. Strangely enough, I got it to work on the command prompt by pressing SHIFT+ALT+`, but that didn’t work on e.g. Notepad++ and Visual Studio.

Solution:

I found out that you can fix that in the settings of the VM itself. You don’t need to shutdown you VM. Just do the following:

• Open the Settings of you VM
• Click on ‘Keyboard & Mouse’
• Just under the list of Profiles, you will see a gear wheel button which you can expand.
• Click in the gear wheel popup menu on the option ‘Edit profile’
• In the popup window, click on the tab ‘Key Mapping’ and unselect the option ‘Enable Language Specific Key Mappings’. This will do the trick (a least for me).
• Close all settings windows, return to your (running) VM and voila, the ‘~’ will work back again.

I assume that this will work on other Windows versions on VM's as well. Just give it a try.

Happy programming!

Change Default UserName in VMware

I was struggling a bit with an incorrect default username my VMware machine was starting with everytime. Everytime I started or reboot the machine, Windows automatically logged on with a default username I don't want to use. This is due to the 'personalize' option during creation of a virtual machine.
Therfore, I first thought it was an VMWare issue, but it turned out it isn't. You need to change something in the Windows registry.

Edit the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mirosoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\WinLogon
Search for the key with the name DefaultUserName and change it to the account you want.