Anyone know of a serial port monitoring app that works well these days? The freeware I used to use is now time limited freemium.
I need a windows app that either spys on a com port, or creates a new one and does man in the middle logging. I’ll just use the bus pirate for now.
I stumbled upon a rather authoritative list from a site I respect just a few hours ago.
Of that list, the only one I’ve used (not on Windows) was CoolTerm. I remember not hating it, but also not liking it enough to remember about it until seeing this list. I still lean to ‘cu’ because it’s part of every OS I use.
wezterm (also in my list of open tabs, but not tried) postdates that list. It sounds very featureful. (pronounced “heavy”). That could be either a bug or a feature.
This mayt be where you decide how strict you want to lean into ‘VT-100’. VTTEST – VT100/VT220/XTerm test utility may help you decide if the issue is the app or your interpretations of control codes. Thomas used in when developing his own version of curses that I used to use.
That’s a good list. I’ve used teraterm for ages, not sure if it is the A or B variant. I like it because at some point it started handling disconnect/reconnect gracefully, which is a huge convenience when running under debug.
MobaXTerm is what I use to administer servers. I never really considered that it was a serial terminal too.
On linux I just discovered TIO:
A little older version is on the Ubuntu main repos. The only small issue is that backspace is acting as delete, so you have to move the cursor over the char before deleting it.
The really good thing is that it auto-reconnects when rebooting the Pirate.
Good addition. Auto reconnect is great, especially during development. Teraterm on Windows does the same and it’s so so handy.
To fix the backspace behavior you can use
tio --map ODELBS
or add the following to your config:
map = ODELBS
Thanks a lot, that’s perfect!
Actually… I saw that option on the man page:
ODELBS Map DEL to BS on output
but I thought that was intended to be used the other way around 
FWIW, from that list, i settled on GitHub - tio/tio: A serial device I/O tool myself. It’s darned awesome out of the box these days.
As an embedded dev, I particularly like –a latest and -a new to attach to the thing I just plugged in or the thing I’m about to plug in. I like that if the thing I’m working on is about to disappear for a few seconds (probably because I just uploaded fresh code and the embedded system/SOC is about to yank the reset line on the USB controller - because it’s in or near the SOC - it’ll go night-night for a few seconds, but will come back. My reads and writes can return 0 for a few seconds and maybe I got a SIGHUP, but I’m confident that the system, and thus, dev node, will soon come back … at least until it runs the part of my code that made it crash. I’m not always blameless in this, so I appreciate tio deciding “we’re cool. I’ll just hang out while you work out your … stuff. I’ll be here when you come back.” and then not really missing a byte. Well, maybe it missed the bytes that I sent it while it was rebooting, but that’s no on the system, either. Where did you expect them to go? “Don’t do that.”
A lot of my little 1-3 line “build the binary, upload the code, honk on reset” scripts now “end” with “tio -a latest” or “tio -a new”. I’ll upload the ESP32 or RP2040/RP2350, pop the reset line, and rendezvous with it soon.
Hooray for tio!
Nice! That is a feature I really love in Teraterm too. After uploading a new firmware it usually reconnects automagically.