15.1.9. 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. The pane opens and closes from its button in the bottom status bar, and like the other panes it can be dragged larger or collapsed entirely.

Screenshot needed

figures/serial-terminal.png – the serial terminal pane with a script’s print output scrolling in it, including one traceback, with the pane’s filter box and Save / Wrap buttons visible. Crop to the terminal pane.

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. Scrolling up pauses the auto-scroll so earlier output can be read while the script keeps printing; scrolling back to the bottom resumes it.

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. The distance from “it crashed” to “this line crashed” is one print.