Serial Monitor Suggestion - Ansi Terminal Support

How about having the serial monitor emulate an ANSI or VT100 terminal so we could use escape sequences to position text on the window. Maybe do color control and some of the other ANSI commands.

I use ANSI from embedded applications with the Arduino now, but I have to run Putty or other emulator on a separate serial port to do it now.

If we cant get ANSI on the serial monitor, I could do a serial switch to connect a second terminal with ANSI support. Use an IO pin, pulled up, so its high after reset. In this state the serial port is connected normally, but once the code starts it could set this pin to output, pull it low, and switch the serial connection to the secondary interface.

I'm not sure about full emulation, but at least a dumb terminal so you don't have to type into a text box and press "send" all the time. I normally use a seperate terminal prog for this reason but sometimes it would be easier just to fire up the monitor.

And maybe an option to handle non-printable chars, how many people have been sending say 1, 2, 3 from their Arduino and not seen anything on the screen.


Rob

I don't have as much trouble with the send box and button. And I know that full ANSI terminal support is a big requirement.

I would like a few terminal commands like:

Move to upper left corner without clearing window
Clear Window
Move to beginning of current line
Move to X,Y position

I looked at doing this once, and it would be a major modification. The current Serial Monitor is some kind of Java text panel rather than any kind of terminal emulator. (I suppose that it is somewhat likely that there is a java class out there than implements ansi emulation, that would be pretty close to just dropping in. I'm not generally happy about the state of desktop programming being about what classes you can find that have already been implemented...)

IMHO If you want full Ansi, use a terminal program, there are plenty of free ones. Many of them allow macros, and file upload, download, and logging etc. Far more features than you can dream of, and fully tested often [ I use putty.exe and realterm.exe ]

And don''t forget "strange" baudrates like 31250 for MIDI or 345600 for faster IO...