Most of the systems I have running under VMware have text consoles with no mouse capabilities at all. When using the console via VMware, in order to type into the console, VMware grabs the mouse and requires you to Ctrl-Alt in order to regain control of the mouse. This is a real pain.
I wrote a program that runs on the guest that switches the console into absolute mouse mode, which means that VMware will relinquish the mouse without Ctrl-Alt, just by moving outside of the window, just like if you had VMware Tools installed on a GUI console.
I've tested this program so far with CentOS 7.1 and FreeBSD 10.1 guests and it seems to work perfectly with the Fusion console (with both local and remote guests) and the Windows vSphere client. I have other OSes that I'm planning to test with, but I'd appreciate some feedback from anyone else.
The source is available on GitHub. The v0.1 release page has 64-bit Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris binares. The binaries probably won't work across 32- vs 64-bit architectures. I'll try to provide additional binaries when possible.