How to grab Cmd-Tab on Macintosh instead of sending to Screen Sharing?

I am using the Screen Sharing application on a Macintosh running OS X Lion. I use Command-Tab to rotate between applications similarly to Alt-Tab on a Windows machine. However, when the Screen Sharing application has focus, the Command-Tab is being interpreted by the target screen instead of my local Macintosh.

How can I override this behavior and have my Macintosh see the Command-Tab instead of the remote screen?


Realize this is old but I have found that killing the 'RFBEventHelperd' process using the Activity Monitor app allows Command-Tab to work properly with Screen Sharing. I have not seen any side effects in killing this process.

Only issue is that you have to kill this process every time you launch a new instance of Screen Sharing.

Here is the link where I found this solution: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20120221065822722


If you press optioncommandx, then the screen sharing window will go into 'observe mode', and won't accept any mouse or keyboard input. Then you can press commandtab and switch apps. I know this doesn't really fix your problem, but it's at least a quick workaround...


On macOS Catalina (10.15.5), I was able to have Cmd-Tab work on my host machine by unloading the RFBEventHelper daemon:

sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.RFBEventHelper.plist
  • You need to have System Integrity Protection disabled
  • You check the status of SIP with csrutil status
  • Disabling SIP is not recommended