Remote Desktop on Mac Microsoft Remote Desktop: disable ctrl+arrow and trackboard four fingers swipes to avoid distraction

Question

Hi,

I was using Microsoft remote desktop to connect to my office windows machine from my personal Macbook Pro for a while. While the RDP protocol is epic for its purpose, I have long been disturbed when I accidentally pressed ctrl+arrows (e.g. ctrl+right or ctrl+up) or swiped four fingers trying to switch windows on my office Windows machine.

I am wondering if there is a way to disable those key bindings or redirect those commands to the remote machine when using Microsoft Remote Desktop. I know I can manually disable the key bindings every time, but I am wondering if there is a better and cleaner way to do this. To be clear, what I had in mind is something like in the Windows version of Microsoft Remote Desktop, once you launched the remote machine, you will be just like using that machine and all your command will be re-direct from the local machine to the remote machine until you move you mouse to the top status bar to close the remote session.

This has been quite disturbing from my end. It would be very helpful and appreciated if anyone could provide me a way to resolve this.

All my best,

Answer 1

Hey,

I was having the same issue and got here looking for a solution. While what you are looking for would be a feature request, I'd like to share how I solved half of the issue, more specifically the ctrl+arrows part.

1. In macOS System Preferences, navigate to Keyboard > Shortcuts tab.
2. Uncheck the boxes for Mission control, Application windows, Move left a space and Move right a space. Alternatively, assign other keyboard shortcuts for those actions if you like using them.

Unfortunately, there is no workaround for disabling the four-finger swipe when Remote Desktop is active, apart from disabling it entirely in System Preferences > Trackpad, which doesn't seem to be what you are looking for. As I said, that would be understood as a feature request, and I'm not even sure that it is doable on the API level.