Project Description

Did this ever happen to you?:

You reboot a server, you have it's serial console ... and you plan to hit that special key during boot like "DEL" for setup, "F8" for BBS, or just anything in Grub to boot something else than the default. But it takes 4 minutes before the moment for pressing that key comes. You wait three, then tired of waiting you switch to check your mail just to miss that 2 second window.

I want to be able to tell my Screen or Tmux: When "Press DEL" appears on the screen, send the "DEL" key

Goal for this Hackweek

I'm heavy GNU Screen user. I looked if something like that was available for screen and did not find anything. In addition, screen seems to be a totally dead project. Tmux seems like a much better alternative for hacking new features and quick googling tells me something similar might be easy to implement using the already available scripting functionality.

So unless this feature turns out to be super-easy to implement in Screen and near-impossible in Tmux, the first step for me would be to ditch Screen from my daily life and learn to live with Tmux.

And then implement the feature, whatever it takes: a scripted add on, a patch to the source code, an external script that controls tmux remotely, ...

I don't want anything too complicated, a full expect support seems like an overkill but if that turns out easy enough, maybe that is the end-goal. If there is a much easier way to implement a limited one-string -> one-key mechanism, I'll be happy with that.