HyperTerminal equiv for OS X

picnic

picnic

picnic

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Used HyperTerminal all the time under Windows and I'm now after something similar for OS X. Any recommendations? Needs to do VT100 emulation and support multiple simultaneous connections using USB-RS232 adaptors.

I've found Zterm but that doesn't seem to support having 2 serial channels open at the same time and frequently kills the iMac (somehow stuffs the keyboard and mouse so they stop working) I found a wired keyboard that still worked but I couldn't get to the menus using it at first, fancy not knowing the intuitive Ctrl-F2 for that ;) Still had to kill the iMac using the power switch as whatever crashed stopped OSX shutting down with an empty blue screen.
 
Not sure, how does one redirect Terminal to interact with a modem's serial port? Need to set baud rates before interacting with the devices as well.
 
Sorry, really old thread but can I resurrect it again please.

Can anyone recommend a Mac OS replacement for HyperTerminal or TeraTerm, as before I need VT100 emulation and the ability to have several connections open at once.

Thanks
 
If you're after an app, then Serial should do what you want and supports USB devices - https://www.decisivetactics.com/products/serial/

Although minicom, if you can find it (Homebrew maybe?), was what i use to use years ago. Otherwise have a read around the screen Unix command - there was an applescript that spawned an "old school" type Terminal for serial interaction that was pretty handy, might be worth a Google.

Edit -
AppleScript - http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20061109133825654
MiniCom - http://freshmeat.sourceforge.net/projects/minicom
Screen command - https://geekinc.ca/using-screen-as-a-serial-terminal-on-mac-os-x/ / https://linux.die.net/man/1/screen
 
Well this is frustrating, I tried Screen and it works OK but its VT100 emulation is somewhat lacking. After messing around for a bit I gave up and bit the bullet and downloaded the trial version of Serial. Good job I did as its VT100 emulation is equally as bad.

I then decided on trying Minicom, think I used this under Linux many years ago. Good news, it's VT100 emulation is much better however I can't seem to get the program to accept any input characters, nothing gets sent on to the device I was testing with nor can I get Minicom to accept the Meta key. I've tried Googling the problem but come up a blank. Anyone got an idea why it won't see any keyboard input?

I used the Brew installation method if that's significant.
 
picnic said:
Well this is frustrating, I tried Screen and it works OK but its VT100 emulation is somewhat lacking.
Click to expand...

IIRC, and i could be wrong, but Terminal allows you to set the emulation mode (to VT100 and a few others) somewhere within the advance settings; have you tried that?

picnic said:
I then decided on trying Minicom....Anyone got an idea why it won't see any keyboard input?
Click to expand...

I remember i had a hardware flow control issue when i used it last and i needed to change that setting for it to work but it's been a good 14/15 years so i'm going to be of no use what so ever unfortunately.
Although i might be worth posting on StackOverFlow or trawling through it as it is/was widely used under *nix, so you should find someone/something to help etc.

Alternatively there are a few others like MacWise (http://carnationsoftware.com/domains/MacWise/Index.html) and zTerm (http://www.dalverson.com/zterm/index.html) that might help. Similarly a Google for 'MacOS VT100' displayed a handful of other options, just need to filter through the apps that supports RS232 etc.

Edit - Do post if you do find a solution though as it'll know doubt help someone else out :)
 
Thanks, I did find that Screen had a terminal type and I tried setting it to VT100. However it also said in the man pages that it only supported VT100 and then relied on the underlying terminal to do provide the support! Confused me somewhat.

As for Minicom, it's not a flow control problem as I can't interact with it at any level. There is a Meta key you use so you can change settings or quit but I can't get that to work. That's not to say there is no flow control that stops key strokes being passed on but I'd expect the local command stuff to work so you can change settings when they're wrong. I do to look deeper as I couldn't find flow control settings in Minicom, seems I might have to use stty?

I'm sure I ended up using ZTerm 10 years ago when I originally asked. But when I tried it the OS said PPC binaries are no longer supported! Perhaps it was just a very old version. It seems many of the Internet searches are from yonks ago and it's also difficult to see ones that actually have serial / RS232 support. Seems many replies are actually for replacements to the plain Terminal program and nothing to do with serial devices.

When I've sussed this I will report back just so I have a reference for next time :)
 
Fixed it :)

Ended up getting an old Raspberry Pi out and running Minicom on that. It worked as expected but it said "Ctrl-A Z" for help rather than the "Meta Key Z" on the status line. So no idea what the Meta Key should be, all the docs point to Ctrl-A or possibly ESC but neither worked. I then found the --setup option for Minicom. In there I could explicitly state the Meta Key is Ctrl-A and all was good. The setup also allowed me to change the port's flow control which had defaulted to hardware. That doesn't work too well on a 3 wire connection ;)

Thanks @visibleman for the pointers and help :cool:
 
VT100 is a series of Escape codes that allow simple things like changing text colours and cursor positioning. But it has some more advanced features like scrollable regions and double size text. Putty on Windows does it all but so far I've only found Minicom that supports scrollable regions. None of them support double size text but I can live without that. Sadly I don't have it anymore but I had a real VT220 Terminal in the loft. Not that it would have done useful stuff like record the data passing back and forth etc. :D
 
I've been using Tabby recently to fulfil this role. However it still has limitations, no double height/width characters, no ability to save the output to a file for later analysis. I can't seem to change baud rate for an open connection so have to close and reopen it.
 
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