Would love to see a few enhanced features added to the Serial Monitor. 

I currently use RealTerm (Sourceforge) which, while quite raw and unpolished, is incredibly useful for this kind of work. 
The bummer is having to switch back and forth with who is connected to the Arduino COM port, of which you handle brilliantly!

The three most valuable RealTerm features are:

- The ability to send data by entering values in hex or dec notation (0xff, $ff, 255) of non-printable characters. Yes, you can use ALT+NUM PAD to enter the decimals, but the unprintable characters are not displayed - for obvious reasons. (This is on the Send tab.)

- A hex view, and a hex+ascii view of the incoming data. (Display tab.) 

- Delimit incoming packet data. (Display tab, Data frames and Binary Sync Chars. )


-CF