Rebanedid you know that SSH has a little-known secret menu?
i wrote a post about this on cohost a while back, but since that site shut down i'm posting it here too
Klaus FrankYes, but did you know that it is basically inaccessible on Keyboard layouts like e.g. de-DE?
Oh and if I recall correctly the keyboard combination is also different on macOS too...
Zimmie@agowa338 @rebane2001 MacOS and Windows both have plain OpenSSH, and the listed escape sequences work on both.
Henrik Pauli@bob_zim @agowa338 @rebane2001 *if* your keyboard layout has a functioning tilde key (a deadkey might output something else and it's nontrivial to make it output just the character itself (and it depends on the OS how it deals with it))
Christer B@phl @bob_zim @agowa338 @rebane2001 For me, on a mac, hitting the deadkey and then space works. So, <Enter> ~ <Space> ? gets me to that menu.
@khrister @phl @bob_zim @rebane2001
Which makes it a different key combination and - well - try googling for it. I've literally never seen this being documented (in a discoverable way) anywhere.
@agowa338 Neither have I. Well, I somehow learned <Enter> ~ ^Z, not sure how. The rest I learned from this toot.
The ~ <space> trick I found out by trial and error, I think.
@phl Huh. I’m not sure I’ve seen a non-exotic (e.g, not for a Corne) layout which entirely lacks tilde as a discrete character. On my German keyboards, it’s on the AltGr layer of the +/* key. Same on Spanish QWERTY keyboards I’ve seen.
Not doubting that such a keyboard exists, I just thought I had seen most of the mass-produced layouts.
But the keyboard sequence becomes different and just trying to press it is annoying to impossible. Esp. if you then also try to do it over e.g an additional IPMI or VMware console in between as well.
It's just one of these things that feel like nobody expected anything but en-US being used as it just sucks. Almost always it is easier to first change your keyboard layout to en-US, press the keyboard shortcut, and switch it back...
@agowa338 @phl It doesn’t become a different sequence, though? Immediately after a new line, send a tilde character to signify the next character is a control character, then send the control character (e.g, ? to get the help and command line). Sure, you may press different keys to cause your keyboard to emit the tilde, but that doesn’t make it a different sequence. For example, nobody specifies Shift-/ in these sequences, they specify ?, and it’s up to you to get your keyboard to emit that character.
Yes, software trying to read scan codes directly and interpret them as US keyboards sucks, but that’s hardly the fault of applications like OpenSSH which do no such thing.
@bob_zim @agowa338 I think Klaus might have meant that depending on the layout the actual keys you have to press changes significantly (often not merely by location too)
I have absolutely no clue what I had to press on Hungarian keyboards for ^] in telnet, come to think of it XD I guess it wasn't what I think it was with my now mostly US-layout mind...
@phl @agowa338 Sure, but it’s the operator’s responsibility to know where characters are on the keyboard which they have. I’m currently switching to Colemak-DH on a split ergonomic keyboard, which has a totally custom layout for the non-alphanum keys (e.g, I have [ on the rightmost column of the left keyboard and ] on the leftmost column of the right). It wouldn’t be OpenSSH’s problem (or my OS’s or anybody but mine) if I didn’t give myself a way to type a tilde or if I forgot where it was.
Look, I'm not disagreeing with "the operator should know". However there at least should be some - easily discoverable, or even linked within "man ssh" - kind of documentation for where that combination gets mapped to on STANDARD keyboard layouts. Especially when it changes the entire sequence, not just location...
All I'm complaining about is the lack of documentation and how annoying it was especially when I first learned about that shortcut.
@bob_zim Hmm, tbf I'm not entirely sure if there's one with it missing (incidentally Spanish was the other layout I was suspicious of)... the deadkey aspect and it being hidden under layer 3 (and who knows if it's printed on the keyboard) definitely makes it more awkward and harder to type though than a Ctrl combination for example.
@phl By way of context, I used to work tech support for a vendor which sells Linux-based servers and which supported a bunch of applications which run on those servers on FreeBSD, Solaris, AIX, and a few other systems. I got calls from people all over the world, including people who had never really used a *NIX command line before, and had to walk them through filesystem operations and through using vim.
I remember dealing with at least seven different keyboard layouts more than once. JIS was a “fun” one because there are at least two wildly different layouts which people identify with that code. One has the tilde in the upper left like ANSI/ISO, the other has it two keys left of backspace.
@bob_zim The latter sounds suspiciously much like a Sun keyboard :D Esc to the left of 1?
@phl Left and up of 1, in the F row. Sometimes the 1 is extra wide and there is no key to its left.
@bob_zim ohh, right, that mode switch key is in the upper left.
I wonder just how many times my ISO trained hands would hit the ろ key instead of right shift if I ever had to use one of those things :D (I guess most other people think the same of the ISO 102nd key and left shift...)