It emulates old-school CRT monitors which sends any grey-bearded hacker (or soon to be) into a nostalgic frenzy. One of the coolest terminal emulators available is Cathode from Secret Geometry, which I’ve written about before (with video). Since it comes with all Unix systems it is hard to beat. On Linux and the Mac, you’ve already got it. On Windows you will probably need to install Cygwin. When it comes to serial communication, it’s the tool I used the most outside of the Serial Monitor. It makes a create terminal client and has the ability to “detach” from the current terminal to run in the background. Screen is a command line based fullscreen VT100 emulator. Every Windows machine I use gets PuTTY in the Start Menu shortcuts. If you’re using Windows, this is probably your best go-to terminal application.

The source is available and looks like it runs on UNIX platforms, but I have never tried. In addition to being a great serial terminal it can also handle telnet, ssh, and a host of other things (no pun intended).

Hands-down one of my favorite terminal applications for Windows is PuTTY from Simon Tatham. However, when you need real time serial interaction or data logging capabilities, that’s when one of these serial monitor alternatives can come in handy. The Arduino IDE includes a “Serial Monitor” which is decent for basic serial communication.

Windows serial terminal program