So you have downloaded the latest Kali iso and installed it in VMware and now you want to copy / paste something from your host machine to the kali machine. By default this won’t work because kali is missing software to communicate with the host machine. The solution is very easy. Instead of downloading the zip from the VMware website and compile it yourself you can easily install it with one command.
apt install open-vm-tools-desktop
This is not the official VMware tools, but this will work the same. It’s an open source project still updated as of today and will work on most other Linux versions as well.
Now reboot your machine and you should now have VMware Tools installed.