Serial for Mac

I'm leaving a comment rather than a starred review as I don't want to drop stars for what must be a very edge case: I use Serial to connect to single board computers running (very) old operating systems, such as CP/M-80 and CP/M-68K. First, let me say that I love the integration of the drivers so that I can connect to the boards without having to install anything extra. As others have already commented, this makes this app unique and great for admins. The bundled Kermit, XModem and YModem etc for sending and receiving files is also great. These two combined is why I bought the app. However, there appears to be a bug in either the CP2102 driver or the bundled Kermit - whereas on my Windows laptop with Terraterm I can transfer files without problem, with Serial nothing but the smallest (1-2K) text files will transfer. Sometimes even not these. Kermit eventually times out on the board end and the file is there but 0 bytes. Unfortunately I paid for the app after testing just the smaller transfers which worked for me that time. I should say that the actual terminal emulation over the serial to USB connection works great - it's just the send/receive file part. I've sent 2 support requests to the author but have not heard anything back - not sure if the help form works or not. So, just in case anyone else has the same use case, be aware of these issues. If you are doing work on something slightly more modern it sounds like you should be more than fine.

Seems to work great but I'm not seeing the $29.99 price. If you click on any of the links, the price sadly shows $39.99. At $40, I'll keep looking around to see what else is available.

Warning: If you want to trial the program, don’t launch the program until you are ready to start the 7 day count down. I made the mistake of downloading and launching it. But then didn’t have an occasion to use it until after the 7 days had elapsed. So at this point, while Serial might be an absolutely great program, I’m going to use CoolTerm as I have no way to verify if Serial is $30 better than CoolTerm, which is free.

This is the only serial terminal I tried that could handle my device spitting a lot of data at 115kb/s without any flow control ability. All others, ZTerm X, CoolTerm and some others were dropping chars sooner or later. And it's great to use my PL2303 adapter without installing any device driver. Serial's builtin drivers are a great idea. Congratulations.

Wow. This app should be in every network admin's toolbox. This is the most Mac-like of any terminal i've tried. I thought i'd test the claim it works with just about any USB adapter, so I dug up an old el-cheapo adapter I could never find Mac drivers for (it uses a CH341 chip) and plugged it in. Instantly recognized. Cool. I also tried it with a PL2303-based adapter, and it worked. I deleted the vendor-supplied driver for the PL2303 adapter- and it still worked- and now unplugging the adapter while a terminal is open doesn't crash my Mac! The emulation is flawless, worked with emacs and make menuconfig on a Linux box over the console port. Just remember to set TERM=vt100 on the box you're logging into. I'd like to see a "send text file" option like some of the other terminals, and this app doesn't yet have a hex view option.