Possible to send CTRL-C into?

[jesseleite]

Hey yo, is it possible to send something like CTRL-C into? I was having trouble sending through to a shell running less +F.

Awesome work on shtuff btw!

[jfly]

We internally we use pexpects .send method to send keys to the running process. https://stackoverflow.com/a/11299721/1739415 says you might be able to call sendcontrol instead: https://pexpect.readthedocs.io/en/stable/api/pexpect.html?highlight=sendcontrol#pexpect.spawn.sendcontrol. It also looks like sendcontrol is a simple wrapper around send, so it's probably possible to concoct the right control codes yourself. I wonder if something like this would work:

$ shtuff into foo -n $'\003'

Where "foo" is the name of some shell running less or something.

[jesseleite]

Yep that works, thanks!

I wonder if it'd be worth supporting tmux-like syntax in the future, like ^c, C-c, Enter, etc.? I believe they have a -l option for sending literal characters. Example:

shtuff into foo -n '^c vim Enter'

...would use string replace on certain keywords to send a CTRL-C, then open vim.

shtuff into foo -n -l '^c vim Enter'

...would send those literal characters, as it does in the current version.

[jfly]

Interesting.

I'm not opposed, but in terms of Unix philosophy, this almost feels like it should be a different tool's job.

Also, if we defaulted to ^c sending ctrl-c that would be a backwards incompatible change, which is fine (we only have 3 users), but just thought I'd mention it.

[jesseleite]

Could always do the opposite and leave default behaviour too. Maybe something like -s to parse 'special keys'?

I get the unix philosophy, but something both tmux and screen have going for UX is allowing ^c, rather than forcing the user to have to go look up that ASCII code 😌

[FatBoyXPC]

How does screen stuff handle this? I don't know if I want to over-commit to tmux or screen features, but if they both do something sane here, then it might be worth bringing in.

@jfly makes a good point about Unix philosophy, but I do think that having an option to send control characters is at least related to what this package does. I don't say that to mean that shtuff needs to do the character parsing, we could find a different package for that or write it and let shtuff depend on it.

[jfly]

we could find a different package for that or write it and let shtuff depend on it

Or if we can't find one, we can create one =)