Serial Monitor needs two clicks before it appears

Development Tools IDE 2.x
1

I have noticed that if I want to turn on the serial monitor from the tools menu in IDE 2.3.2 I have to click on it twice. If I click on it once nothing happens and I have to click on it again before the monitor appears.

2

When you hover your mouse over the serial monitor spyglass button, does it (1) change color, and do you see (2) "Serial Monitor" text show to the left and at the same time in a (3) "ALT" text in a yellow box to the right?

1 Like
3

Hi @steveinaustria. Thanks for your report. Something to note is that Tools > Serial Monitor acts as a toggle. If you already have the "Serial Monitor" view open in Arduino IDE, selecting that menu item will close the view. Selecting the menu item a second time will then reopen the view.

My hypothesis is that this toggle behavior might be the explanation for what you are perceiving as needing to "click on it twice". The bottom panel of the Arduino IDE window has a tabbed design, where you can have multiple views open, but only the selected view is visible in the bottom panel. We will typically have both an "Output" view and a "Serial Monitor" view open at the same time. If the "Output" view is selected and you don't notice the presence of the "Serial Monitor" tab, you might not realize that the Serial Monitor is already open and thus be surprised by the fact that it doesn't open after the first time you select Tools > Serial Monitor.

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1 Like
4

Thanks. That was indeed the problem!

5

You are welcome. I'm glad we were able to identify the exact nature of the behavior.

The toggle behavior of the menu item is probably a bit unintuitive. More likely the user would expect the menu item to:

  • If the view is not already open, open it (as it does already)
  • If the view is already open, but not selected, select it.
  • If the view is already open and selected, do nothing.

I don't see anything specific to Serial Monitor, but there is a similar request for Library Manager and Boards Manager:

The behavior should become more intuitive if the developers ever get around to moving Serial Monitor to a dedicated window:

After that, Serial Monitor should have the same behavior as Serial Plotter, which is not toggled by the menu item.

6

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