How to use the menu

[Jip-Hop]

Hi! My menu doesn't look like the one in the readme:

I only have [RETURN] boot [CTRL-R] recovery shell [CTRL+H] help in my menu. The other keyboard shortcuts are not listed. Would be helpful to see them too. How can I enable that?

I tried [CTRL+H] to read the help items. But how can I scroll down to read more of the text? Arrow down will move to the next item (e.g. from Main Screen to ZPOOL Health even though there's still more text to read for Main Screen). I tried mouse buttons, arrow keys, spacebar, enter... Can't figure out how to read the rest xD

Also, is there an option to reboot from the ZFSbootmenu directly? I get System has not been booted with systemd as init system error when trying reboot from ZFSbootmenu emergency shell.

[zdykstra]

ZFSBootMenu relies on the shell utility column to show the full keybind text, which is typically part of the util-linux package (or a variant of that name). With out it, it falls back to a limited menu keybind text. On what OS are you building the ZFSBootMenu initramfs?

You can use shift+arrow keys to scroll the help text. It sounds like a bit of additional text somewhere to explain that would be helpful.

ctrl-alt-del might be respected to reboot your system from inside ZFSBootMenu; let me know if that works for you.

[Jip-Hop]

ctrl-alt-del might be respected to reboot your system from inside ZFSBootMenu; let me know if that works for you.

Thanks, this reboots my system :) Perhaps this could also be inside the help menu? It's great that there's a search function inside the help menu. When searching for reboot I didn't find anything. Shall I add ctrl-alt-del to the help menu?

shift+arrow keys

This is not working for me... It switches to the next help item instead.

On what OS are you building the ZFSBootMenu initramfs?

I followed Debian Bullseye installation with ESP on the zpool disk.

[Jip-Hop]

I figured out how to scroll down in the help menu:

zfsbootmenu/zfsbootmenu/libexec/zfsbootmenu-help

Line 36 in 037bb55

--bind pgup:preview-up,pgdn:preview-down \

Using the Page Up and Page Down keys.

Would be great if a hint could be displayed for this when opening the help menu... Maybe above the hint for [ESCAPE] back. Also, some keyboards don't have these keys. Mine does, they are activated with the arrow up/down keys in combination with the Fn key.

[zdykstra]

I've added keybind documentation to the online help browser.

[Jip-Hop]

Thank you!

Should we document the reboot functionality too? I was thinking to add something like this to docs/pod/online/recovery-shell.pod:

=item I<reboot>

The reboot command isn't working. Instead you can press CTRL+ALT+DELETE to reboot. This works not just in the Recovery Shell, but anywhere in zfsbootmenu.

[ahesford]

No. If we document things that don't work as they do on a full system, we'd write the longest manual ever conceived. Ctrl+Alt+Del is a well known key sequence to effect a reboot, rebooting from ZFSBootMenu is not an ordinary operation, and it would also be possible to just press the reset or power button.

[Jip-Hop]

Fair enough! Just one more thing I was wondering about. The shortcuts in the Help menu are written as MOD+J. But the main menu shows CTRL+J. Why is the CTRL key called MOD in the Help menu?

[zdykstra]

The modifier key can be one of CTRL, ALT, or CTRL+ALT . Writing that out as MOD was the best compromise we could come up with.

[Jip-Hop]

Thanks again for answering all my questions. 🙂

Why is MOD/CTRL inconsistent between the main screen and the help pages? And has it been considered to add a "welcome" page to the help menu? Perhaps something like:

Help Menu

Welcome to ZFSBootMenu Help Menu.

• Type to search inside help chapters
• Switch chapters with Up and Down arrow keys
• Scroll using Page Up and Page Down keys
• The MOD in keyboard shortcuts can be CTRL, ALT, or CTRL+ALT
• Press CTRL+ALT+DELETE to reboot