I am using VMWare Fusion 8.5.8 on MacOS 10.12.6 with a guest of MacOS 10.12.5.
Periodically drag and drop stops working. Usually I can reboot and it will start to work again. This time a reboot did not fix it.
I contacted VMWare and they declined support because they claim it does not work and it never worked. They sent me this link supposedly supporting that, but by my reading it does not support their claim:
https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1032440
I am quite sure that I use drag and drop between the guest and host previously as it is part of my development workflow.
Further supporting my claim that it previously worked I previously submitted a ticket about it not working, but by the time the support person got back to me I had to reboot and no longer had a test case for them to work on. They then suspended the ticket.
If someone could run a quick video of drag and drop working on they similar setup I would appreciated getting a copy so I could send it to VMWare to get them to take my issue seriously.
What can I try to get drag and drop to work again?
[EDIT] I updated the guest machine to 10.12.6 and drag and drop started to work again. Problem solved except I want to get to the bottom of it to keep it from happening in the future.
I just got this email from VMware claiming that this feature does not work:
** Please do not change the subject line of this email if you wish to respond. **
Hello Michael,
Thank you for your response.
This feature is not supported. Kindly refer the knowledge base article
which lists the limitations for VMware Fusion 8.5.8 and also for the
latest Fusion 10.The feature may have worked in the earlier builds or may work
intermittently with the newer version. However, we have checked with
the engineering team and they have confirmed that we do not support
the drag and drop feature.These were the inputs which were shared directly from the engineering
team: For MacOS guest, Drag & Drop/Copy & Paste file is not supported,
it only supports copy text between guest and host. Like copy a string
in TextEdit from guest and paste it to host's TextEdit.So, it's not a bug
We request you to submit a feature request.
Best Answer
I found out today that it does work with VMware Fusion 10.1.2 and VMware Tools 10.2.5 on Mac OS X 10.11.6 El Capitan but it doesn't work for me on macOS 10.13.4.
Probably this has something to do with User Authorized Kernel Extension Loading (UAKEL). If your Mac is managed by an MDM, kernel extensions are managed by User Approved MDM Enrollment (UAMDM) a management profile.
As far as I understand how Drag and Drop works, it used some kind of filesystem driver. Maybe this used to use a (third party?) kernel extension which is no longer trusted?
Further Readings:
UAKEL: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn2459/_index.html
UAMDM: https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2018/04/12/whitelisting-third-party-kernel-extensions-using-profiles/?_sm_byp=iVV4WQj4MknqbVsJ