Description of problem: Virt-manager uses the keyboard shortcut ctrl+alt to toggle inside/outside the VM (aka release pointer). Now Gnome uses ctrl+alt+arrow_key to switch virtual desktops. So these two shortcuts collide and virt-manager will grab the key presses as soon as ctrl+alt is pressed and toogle inside/outside the VM, which makes switching desktops impossible. There should be at least 2 ways to get this working. Solution 1 (more elegant but probably more complex): Do not immediately take action on key-down press event, instead wait for another key to be pressed besides ctrl+alt (i.e. ctrl+alt+left) and react on that. Otherwise if only ctrl+alt is pressed and the keys are released trigger on that event to do the actual toggle inside/outside VM. (Note: when outside the VM ctrl+alt+<something> should be handled by the windowmanager) Benefit of this approach: All ctrl+alt+<something> keyboard shortcuts should work, no more need for "ctrl+alt+<something> send keys". This should also allow to switch virtual desktops inside and outside of a VM. Solution 2 (less intrusive and easier to accomplish): Just check whether currently inside or outside of the VM and pass ctrl+alt+<something> to the window manager if outside. Benefit of this approach: Allow switching of virtual desktops outside of VM. Should be easier to accomplish without having looked at the actual code. I'd prefer getting Solution 1 to work without knowing how much effort that would cost. Thanks for considering, I'll try to help out on this as good as I can.
This is all handled at the gtk-vnc level, so re-assigning bug.
This is fairly annoying alright; adding to F12VirtTarget
Since this has sat for 3+ years, I've moved it to the upstream tracker: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=685257