> So, what do you do when you want to send 'key release' events over SSH when the target machine doesn't have an X server? Well, you have to build your own client/server application where a client/server listens locally on the machine with the keyboard, and then forwards these events to the remote machine where you're running the applications that needs to respond to these events. That sounds like a lot of work because you have to set up all the sockets and custom messaging protocols, but there's no way around it because the key release events simply aren't forwarded over your terminal-based SSH session when there is no X server forwarding configured.

This isn't that much work if you write it as a trivial Web app using WebSockets. Then you can leverage the browser's OS abstraction layer instead of having to write your own.