Tuesday, June 11, 2013

ALT TAB with Citrix ICA Remote Access Client

For some reason, the folks at Citrix don't feel that settings should be easily configurable nor should experiences be consistent.  If you are remoting into a machine, its my assumption that for the majority of cases, you would want to assume that remote machine as your own, ergo, all the commands you are used to using should be passed through and just work.  Alas, this is not the case.  Its very jarring when connected to a remote session, especially in full screen view, and you hit a key combination like ALT + TAB and you get thrown back into your host desktop.  Since I perform a lot of after hours support through Remote Access to my work, I want to ensure my experience is seamless since I often have dozens of windows open at a time.

The most reliable way to enable ALT+TAB I have found is to edit the wfclient.ini file.  This file is available whenever you install the Citrix Receiver client.

It can be found in the following locations:

Windows
%appdata%\ICAClient\WFCLIENT.INI

Linux and OSX
~/.ICAClient/wfclient.ini

In that file you want to find the [WFClient] and add the following to the end of the file.
TransparentKeyPassthrough=Remote

Restart your ICA or Remote Access session and enjoy.  This should work whenever the session has focus regardless of if it is full screen or not.  If you only want it to pass through when its full screen, then change Remote to FullScreenOnly.