I Have No Mouse, and I Must Scream†
Do you use text consoles under VMware? Are you tired of VMware grabbing your mouse and having to Ctrl-Alt or Ctrl-Cmd out of them‡ in order to work in another window, despite that the mouse has no function inside the text console? Do you need to scream?
Run scream on the guest once per boot (in a startup script would make sense).
It doesn't make any difference if the program is run within the console or not,
and it doesn't require any elevated guest privileges. Run scream -d to
revert.
As you may already know, VMware consoles have two mouse modes: absolute and relative positioning. If VMware Tools is not running in the guest, or, more accurately, no VMware-aware tool has requested otherwise, the console runs in relative mode. This means that the console grabs the mouse and presents any movement of the mouse directly to the guest, emulating a PS/2 mouse. In absolute mode, the console bypasses the PS/2 emulation and sends the absolute position of the mouse to VMware tools, which then tells the guest where to move its pointer.
Absolute mode won't work if you don't have VMware Tools installed, because nothing is listening for that out-of-band mouse data. So it makes sense that the console defaults to relative mode. What doesn't make sense is that the console has to grab the mouse in order to send keyboard data, which, unless I'm mistaken, is always sent as emulated PS/2 keyboard codes.
I figured that if the guest requested that the console enable absolute mode, it
could then read those out-of-band mouse data and figure out when to give up
mouse control. As it turns out, it's even simpler than that. Once you enable
absolute mode, the console deals with figuring out when the mouse pointer has
left the console and automatically ungrabs it. All the guest has to do,
assuming it doesn't care about the mouse at all, is request absolute mode. And
that's what, and all, scream does.
† Inspired by the Hugo Award-winning short story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”, by Harlan Ellison
‡ “To release your mouse press: Control-⌘” and “To release cursor, press CTRL + ALT”