If like me your using Parallels on a mac for your development you’ll find that debugging can be a pain in the ass.  Lots of the keyboard shorcuts you use on a regular basis in Windows needs a bit of configuring in OSX in order to get them to work correctly.

I use the function keys a lot so the first task is to get the function keys to work as function keys, this will be applied in OSX as well as any VMs you’re running.

In OSX go Apple -> System Preferences -> Keyboard and select the Keyboard page, make sure the following option is checked:

“Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys”

With that option set all the nice little Apple functions need to be accessed using “fn + F8”, the default is great for casual users and pain for anyone else.  Anyway …

Next you need to remove the default functions for the F11 and F12 keys so that OSX doesn’t “intercept” the key press and do it’s function rather than letting that make it’s way to Parallels and then consequently your Windows Vm.  So swith to the “Keyboard shortcuts” page and make sure the following two options are deselected:

“Show Desktop – F11”

“Show Dashboard – F12”

Now you should be able to use these keys as you would F11 and F12 in Windows.  Yay.  I don’t understand why F12 is still mapped by default to show the dashboard in OSX considering it’s fairly unused these days.

Anyway, happy debugging!

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