I use "Serial Monitor" to monitor the output of the serial port for my project, and will eventually replace Serial Monitor with a standard serial ascii terminal emulator once development of the project is completed. That project makes use of basic ASCII control codes such as Backspace, Carriage Return and Bell to control the serial terminal display.
I'm using Arduino 1.0.5 and find that Serial Monitor does not respond correctly to basic control codes such as Carriage Return (0x0d), Back Space (0x08), Bell (0x07) (additionally, but of less importance to me, it's not possible to have Serial Monitor provide ONLY an LF function when a LF is recevied). I do note that Horizontal TAB (0x09) DOES appear to work correctly, causing the next printed character to appear at position 9, 17, 25, etc., which is great.
I find that Serial Monitor in 1.0.5 prints a space in response to a received BELL, ENQ or BACKSPACE, does nothing in response to a received CR, and responds to LF by executing a CR and an LF. I realize that this LF operation might be a desirable thing to do, but I'd prefer that Serial Monitor allow the user to configure what happens when LF is received.
I'd be very grateful to the Arduino Development Team if a future version of the Arduino IDE would improve Serial Monitor to respond correctly to at least CR, Bell and Backspace, with an option to only execute a Line Feed when an LF (0x0a) character is received. Triple bonus points if an ENQ would cause Serial Monitor to transmit a short user specified text string, as in: Enquiry character - Wikipedia.
Thanks for any assistance the development team might be able to provide on this issue in a future release of the IDE.
Best wishes,
Paul_N