did you know that SSH has a little-known secret menu?

[agowa338@chaos.social]

@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@chaos.social]

@bob_zim @phl

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@chaos.social]

@gkrnours @rebane2001

I could do that If I'd only connect from one device to a hand full of other devices. But that just doesn't work when you're doing work for customers.

Configuring that would be even harder than getting the key combination changed within the OpenSSH source code for everyone...

[bob_zim@infosec.exchange]

@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.

[khrister@mastodon.social]

@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@mastodon.social]

@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.

[gkrnours@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@agowa338 @rebane2001 ssh -e \

[phl@mastodon.social]

@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...

[bob_zim@infosec.exchange]

@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.

[agowa338@chaos.social]

@bob_zim @phl

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.

[draeath@infosec.exchange]

@agowa338 @rebane2001 you can change the binding!

[kirby@freerobuxextremist.com]

@rebane2001 stolen from the corpse of what was once a giant

[agowa338@chaos.social]

@draeath @rebane2001
See the other post, that'd be possible if I wasn't a consultant jumping hundreds of systems spread out across different customers. Sometimes even just for a few days or weeks in some projects. In my situation getting upstream to accept changing it would even be easier

Changing the binding on all of them or even just trying to find the ~ key itself is way more annoying than closing and reopening the terminal. Or when it is on a TTY switching to another and "killall -9 ssh".

[avatastic@avatastic.uk]

@rebane2001 wha... no ... wha...

[mrgrumpymonkey@mastodon.social]

@rebane2001 Isn't this just the nerdiest thing I've seen today.

[jonw@social.lol]

@rebane2001 @catsalad Isn’t that just an abbreviated man page?

[piepants@famichiki.jp]

@rebane2001 mind blown, thank you for sharing!

[jsit@social.coop]

@rebane2001 I do enter tilde period A LOT and it’s a god send

[lp0_on_fire@social.linux.pizza]

@rebane2001, it doesn't even have to be Enter as there's no keycode checking going on; Return, Ctrl-M and (not really all that surprisingly) Ctrl-J all work equally well.

It's not enabled here by default (OpenSSH on Devuan; see ssh_config(5)), but it's trivial to do per-session:
ssh -e'~' USER@HOST

I can even use ^] if I want to (to a small extent) mimic telnet, either as that pair of characters representing Ctrl-] or the actual character itself (inserted as a literal via e.g. the shell's quote key).

[jfkimmes@social.tinycyber.space]

@rebane2001 Only problem is: I would only use it to look up how to terminate a hanged connection, because I always forget which weird shortcut that is -- but opening this help menu requires me to remember already half the keys from that shortcut. 🥲