Tio is a serial terminal for us

With Linux and the serial port, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that Linux offers excellent support for serial hardware of all kinds and a host of tools for accessing the serial port. This is important when using a lot of serial type devices like Arduinos with USB ports and such. The bad news is that most terminal software is designed to accommodate the days when a computer had real serial terminals and modems with people interacting with them. We bet that's why [lundmar] developed tio, a serial device I/O tool for people like us.

Honestly, how many times have you needed Zmodem file transfers and DCD signal recognition to detect an incoming connection? Of course, there are plenty of other programs out there that will get the job done, but tio brings clean simplicity along with features that embedded developers need.

The software will support arbitrary devices, display statistics and give you control of RS232 lines. There's support for delayed characters and lines, useful if you're dealing with a super simple device with no handshake. There is also hexadecimal support and many ways to save data and statistics. We especially like that it can automatically reconnect, which is a nice feature.

Of course you want certain terminal features and tio includes them. For example, you can choose to enable local echo or to map the characters so that, for example, a carriage return becomes a carriage return and a line feed. You can use command-line options to configure most things, including features like network socket redirection. Other commands inside the program - by default, triggered by Control + T - let you do things like send a break, toggle handshake lines, and more.

You may think the serial port is dead, but it just turned into a USB port. Of course, like everything else these days, you can also get your terminal in the browser.