Static Serial Monitor?

Hello!

I wanted to know if anyone knows the name of what I am looking for or how to do it.

I find it rather annoying that the serial monitor keeps creating a new line every time it goes through the loop, especially since I have 5 states that need checked. I don't want to keep pausing the monitor after pressing a button to ensure that the Arduino has correctly read the pin.

I was wondering is there a way to just have 5 lines on the monitor and the digitalRead value from pins would just update rather than having hundreds of lines of practically the same thing.

Thanks.

Use a proper serial terminal emulator, like puTTY, and send only a carriage return ('\r'), instead of carriage return and line feed at the end of the readings.

I was wondering is there a way to just have 5 lines on the monitor and the digitalRead value from pins would just update rather than having hundreds of lines of practically the same thing.

Not possible using the Serial monitor because the cursor control commands are not implemented. You could, however, use another terminal emulator where the commands are implemented but you would need to explicitly send the commands to the emulator.

Another alternative, albeit with other implications, would be to use an LCD screen for debugging output.

Make the window smaller?

Turn off auto-scroll?

Change your sketch so it doesn't display anything unless something interesting happens (like a value changes)?

You can also tab out your readings so a different variable prints at a different horizontal
Position on the screen

It's pretty hacky, but if you know the vertical size of the Serial Monitor window, you can write your code so that it scrolls the window a full page every time the values update. This will give the effect of the values always being printed to the same location. Someone made a quadcopter game for Arduino using this technique:
http://tunn.us/arduino/quadcopter.php