13.1.9. The serial terminal

The pane along the bottom of the main window is the serial terminal: everything the running script writes to standard output – every print(), every warning, every traceback – streams into it live. It is the script’s voice during development, and reading it is half of debugging. Open and close it from its button in the bottom status bar; like the other panes, you can drag it larger or collapse it entirely.

The serial terminal: the script’s prints, the traceback that ended the script, and the camera’s banner after the stop.

The terminal keeps a deep scrollback (100,000 lines), and its toolbar offers a filter box that narrows the view to lines matching a search, a save button that writes the whole buffer to a text file, and a wrap toggle for long lines. The text zooms with Ctrl+scroll like the editor. Scroll up and the auto-scroll pauses so you can read earlier output while the script keeps printing; scroll back to the bottom and it resumes.

The pane is output-only – it displays what the camera prints but does not accept typed input. For an interactive REPL prompt on the camera, open a standalone terminal window instead.

Tracebacks are wired into the editor. When a script dies with an unhandled exception, the IDE parses the traceback as it prints, jumps the editor to the offending line, and – when the failing file is a module on the camera’s drive rather than the open script – opens that file at the failing line. You go straight from “it crashed” to the line that crashed.