Microsoft Remote Desktop 8 for PC and Mac

Software Reviews and Criticism

• By Crazyfish2.0

  Consistent updates and reliable

  I use this app constantly to remote into Windows servers from a Windows. It’s pretty great! Only suggestion I have is it would be awesome if it were possible to remap keys and create custom ones myself to make editing text much more fluid. For example, command+c becomes control+c. Option+left/right arrow becomes control+left/right arrow to make cusor skipping over words. Option+shift+right/left arrow becomes control+shift+left/right arrow. There are many of these that would make it possible for me to retire Parallels/vmware on my Windows. Command+R should be F5. Also, I think having the command key operate as a Windows key just gets in the way. It would be nice to disable that. Thanks for the consideration. Great app! Edit: It is fantastic to hear some of this is solved in a future release. Having a few shortcuts is a step in the right direction. Please consider opening this up to user-customization in the future release as well.

  
  
• By jasondunn

  Quite good, one fatal flaw

  Overall this is an excellent app and I appreciate being able to connect easily to my Windows desktop PC acting as a headless server. However, there's one critical flaw: there appears to be no size limit on the clipboard. On my Windows PC I moved 120 GB worth of files via copy/paste. The next morning I couldn't figure out why my Windows was down to only 12 GB of storage - I dug into the depths of the cache files and found that the remote desktop software had pulled over the 120 GB of files. Come on developers, that is insane - there should be a default limit on the size of files that are copied over from the clipboard. Maybe 1 GB by default and there's an option for an override. But 120 GB? That's insane. Please fix that.

  
  
• By ToryWho

  Turn off All Monitors by default and add quick connect

  There needs to be an option to set a default settings for new session entires. One thing I NEVER use is multiple monitors for RDP. About half the time I forget to uncheck that box when I create a new entry and have to close the session, and go back in and change it. Can’t there just be a place in properties to set sane defaults per the user so that this problem goes away? Also, there needs to be a quick connect option. I work with thousands of Windows VMs, and rarely have to connect to the same one more than a couple of times a year. I don’t want to have to create a new entry a dozen times a day for every session I access. I just want a quick connect box where I can pop in a name and go. This is the one application, that I wish behaved more like the Windows version.

  
  
• By Atlstjohn

  May be lacking a few features but it works really well

  Reading all of the other reviews I realize that this app doesn’t get the love it deserves. It’s frustrating that you have to define and save a connection before using it, but it’s SO head and shoulders above Microsoft’s own Remote Desktop. Scales for high DPI clients well. It’s super-stable, and it’s fast. I run paralllels on my MBP and default to using this over the native client every time. I can’t find fault since it works every time, and works well. The ideas put forth here by other reviewers would genuinely improve it so hopefully they’re given consideration.

  
  

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