Thanks for the tip on pausing the Serial output. Nice to not use the connect checkbox in this capacity.
Tim@Visual Micro wrote on Jan 24
th, 2015 at 12:00am:
Yes I have been considering control chars but also some sort of macro/command syntax.
As concerns control chars how to you propose they would be best implemented? Using the normal keys along with "Alt" detection or by entering some special escape codes? Please give a few examples.
I've not given this much thought, but here are a few ideas off the top of my head:
When the serial monitor's text box has focus, ctrl+Key would be interpreted as a control code. The problem is you loose other "Windows" control keys. The most obvious would be copy and paste. Might not be a big deal as you can always right-click and use context menu.
A different approach would be to have another button which brought up a context menu allowing the insertion of a control character, either by selecting from a list, or typing in the hex or decimal code.
Another approach is to use the context menu when clicking on the text box. There's already a "Insert Unicode control character" sub-menu, so this might make the most sense.
When entered, the control code would appear in the text box as the letter typed preceded by a ^, so to send an ESCAPE, you would press ctrl+[ and ^[ would appear in the text box. If you wanted to be really fancy, you could do like notepad++ and have unique symbols for each special character, usually a box with the two or three character code in it. That way you don't have to remember that ^I is a tab.
If you pressed backspace or delete, the ^ and the following letter would both be removed as a single unit.
I can see the value of some sort of macro functionality, but I'd probably just use a dedicated terminal program like SecureCRT, HyperAccess, etc. Perhaps the option to launch an external terminal program rather than the built in one?