Tera Term

May 20th 2018

For years I have used TeraTerm as my serial terminal window. 

Teraterm has some nice features:

Automatic reconnect - when USB serial port is unplugged teraterm disconnects, when it is plugged back in it automatically reconnects.

Color - using escape sequences you can change the color of text. 

However teraterm has had a nasty problem, after some period of time it starts displaying junk.

For years I have cursed when this happens but have never found a better serial terminal program.  So I decided I would have to either fix it or code my own.  So I started reviewing teraterm's code. As I reviewed the source code I found that it appears an escape sequence is found in the serial port data which is changing the character set.  As I read the code I found that the TERATERM.INI had settings to control this. 

; Enabled ISO-2022 Shift Function (on/off/combination of SI,SO,LS2,LS3,LSR1,LSR2,LSR3,SS2,SS3)

ISO2022ShiftFunction=off

By turning the ISO 2022 this problem went away! 

Note I might still code up my own terminal some day as that I few other things I would like including

Hexadecimal mode.  Additionally I have found teraterm consumes large amounts of CPU resources.