pexpect maintainer here. If this is any kind of criticism on the complexity of pexpect, then you're perfectly correct! Good job, pexpect is unfortunately too o

pexpect maintainer here. If this is any kind of criticism on the complexity of pexpect, then you're perfectly correct! Good job, pexpect is unfortunately too old and widely adopted to go changing API for pythonic sake, its freshly due for a rewrite. Trying to mimic a tcl/expect pattern in python made for unpythonic patterns and user confusion. It was far less confusing in 2002 when most python developers had former experience in tcl/expect -- most people these days never heard of it. I feel an expect replacement would best work with the asyncio.StreamReader and asyncio.StreamWriter interfaces, and allow expecting on multiple possible patterns and streams at the same time, using asyncio.wait_for -- which supplies its own timeout functionality, and of course interoperates with the asyncio event loop. Making a python3 asyncio-only library might not be attractive for yesterday's python users, but it might ensure nobody will rewrite it all over again in another 12 years so!