TTY Clear Screen?

I've noticed that when I send debugging information to the serial monitor in the IDE, it doesn't recognise ASCII form feeds (\f), so I can't clear the screen. Is there some other way of getting the cursor back to top left, or could it be considered as an enhancement in a future release?

The IDE's "Serial Monitor" feature is pretty barebones. It would be nice if it did support a few other basic one-character controls like \f or \r.

You'd do well by looking at other applications that already support full VT100 or ANSI kinds of terminal capabilities. (Hyperterminal comes to mind.) The only downside is that you have two seconds after an upload or reset to tell your terminal app to (re)connect.

Hi Halley,

Thanks for the advice. I've tried Hyperterminal, but it's a bit of a pain. I'll scout around fro other software, but it'd be lovely to be able to do it all in the IDE.

"applications that already support full VT100 or ANSI "

LOL, I thought I was the only one who remembered ANSI :slight_smile:

I actually did experiment with it:

And it has a clearscreen function :wink:

Remember Ansii, Heck some of us old 'uns remember paper tape.

"Remember Ansii, Heck some of us old 'uns remember paper tape"

Hell some of us are old enough to remember working with 5 bit baudot coded TTY paper tapes. Us real men didn't need 8 bits in those days :wink:

Letters shift / figures shift / unshift on space

Lefty

Happy days Lefty, happy days. ;D

Those were the days!

I learned my computing in the late 1970s/early 1980s. In 'O' level computer studies, we had to punch our cards and send them off to Manchester University to be read and run, with the results coming back a week later. Waiting a week for an error message certainly taught me to debug on paper in a hurry! Then we got a TRS-80 II and a Video Genie (anyone remember them?) and nothing was ever the same again.

Anyway, back on topic and Hyperterminal sometimes doesn't release its lock on COM4 even when the line's been dropped and the terminal is terminated, thereby preventing further code uploads. Sometimes, restarting the IDE clears the lock, other times it's a full reboot. Any ideas?

EDIT: There does seem to be a workaround. Restart the IDE, connect the serial monitor, disconnect it again, and upload the code. I don't know if it always works, however.

When the ide is running it's serial monitor, anything it receives is printed to the console (in windows anyway). It used to be you would just load ansi.sys and you'd get ansi. And if serial monitor was echoing ansi codes from your arduino to the command console then you should see ansi renderings.

Things are getting a bit more complicated on xp/nt. And I never tried ansi on unix. But it would be "built in" at that point.
http://www.windowsnetworking.com/kbase/WindowsTips/Windows2000/UserTips/Miscellaneous/CommandInterpreterAnsiSupport.html