I've tried looking around to see if there was some way to emulate this behavior already, if there is I apologize but I haven't found anything.

What I'm trying to do: follow an alternate set of commands when hitting enter and shift+enter on a menu title.

For example, boot a linux distribution normally when hitting enter and booting a failsafe set of commands when hitting shift+enter. (When I say shift it can be any other key, it's just an example).

Of course I could just add another menu title with the alternate commands like I'm doing now but this would avoid clogging up the menus with a bunch of alternate boot options.

I wonder, if this isn't possible at the moment, would it be something feasible to code, so I could expect it in the near future (pretty please :) )?

I've been thinking a bit about this. In terms of menu syntax, how about this:

title/iftitle Main entry root (hd0)

alttitle First alternate root (hd1)

alttitle Second alternate root (hd2)

...

When loading this menu, initially only "Main entry" would appear. By hitting some key (maybe shift?) it would be replaced by "First alternate", hit shift again and it's replaced by "Second alternate". So shift would surf through all alttitle's before the next title/iftitle and when it can't find anymore it goes back to the previous title/iftitle.

Am I dreaming about this or could it be done?

Why not use the hotkey utility so you can have hotkeys for each menu.

F8 Boot to linux F9 Boot to XP etc. F8+SHIFT Boot to linux in safe mode F9+SHIFT Boot to XP in safe mode

the second set of menus could have no title and be placed at the end of the menu. You can have many untitled menus at the end

I had tried that, the thing about hotkey is you need an actual menu entry in there for the hotkey to work. Even if I "hide" it by giving it an empty title, it's still selectable if you scroll down the list, and for that I'd rather put an actual menu entry in a proper place so it returns back to the top of the menu when you scroll down on the last "visible" entry.

Assigning the hotkey to an iftitle that returns false (thus not showing that entry in the menu) won't work as technically the entry won't exist and so the hotkey for it won't exist either.

Have one menu entry called Toggle Alternate Mode (password protect the alternate mode) and the code could be:

title Toggle Alternate Mode password altmode if "%ALTMODE%"=="" set ALTMODE=OFF if "%ALTMODE%"=="OFF" set ALTMODE==ON || if "%ALTMODE%"=="ON" set ALTMODE=OFF pause --wait=3 ALTERNATE MODE is set to %ALTMODE% && exit root ()

title Boot linux (use altmode for safe boot) if "%ALTMODE%"="ON" kernel /live/vmlinuz boot=live config noswap noprompt acpi=off irqpoll noapic noapm nodma nomce nolapic nosmp ip=frommedia nomodeset vga=normal nosplash if "%ALTMODE%"="OF" kernel /live/vmlinuz boot=live config noswap ip=frommedia initrd /live/initrd.img

sorry - typo - if "%ALTMODE%"="OFF" kernel !!!

Functionally that would work, but it's not much different than creating whole alternate menus, that you could access hitting the "Toggle Alternate" menu entry. Also it still needs one actual menu entry to toggle it and personally I wouldn't use that strategy because you can't add any info in the menu screen saying alt mode is on or off, if you happened to miss the message then you'd have to toggle it again and again to confirm.

You can do this with the grubutils bios utility (in the root in this example) as follows:

/bios int=0x16 eax=0x00000200 > (md)0x300+1 && cat --skip=12 --length=2 (md)0x300+1 | set /a n=0x > nul set /a n=%n% & 0x03 && if %n%>=1 echo SHIFT PRESSED!

LShift=01, RShift=02,CTRL=04,ALT=08,SCROLL=10,NUM=20,CAPS=40,INS=80

set /a n=%n% & 0x04 > nul && if %n%>=1 echo CTRL PRESSED!

use n to set a variable = e.g. if %n%>=1 set sf=acpi=off noapic noapm then use in kernel ccccc fffff fff %sf% vvvv hhhhh

See http://rmprepusb.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/using-shift-key-to-modify-behaviour-of.html for an example menu

Thanks, this was exactly what I wanted. I'm assuming it was you who created that blog post (same name), I left you a suggestion there to reset shift status as well.