Add ANSI code support in serial monitor

[tchilton]

Describe the request

The IDE, like many other development environments and applications, uses colour, reverse video text, flashing text and screen control (position, clear screen, etc) all of which, when used appropriately aids readability.

However, this capability is not extended to the serial monitor, meaning that sketches can't use these commonly available features.

The request is to add support for ANSI codes, thus allowing the screen to be manipulated more effectively with colour, cursor manipulation, screen clear, flashing text, etc. This allows for error conditions to be more readable in output text for example.

ANSI codes are defined here : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code](ANSI Codes)

Describe the current behavior

The terminal does not respond to ANSI codes and simply prints them out. Competing serial monitoring tools such as PuTTY and minicom correctly respond to such codes.

Arduino IDE version

2.1.1

Operating system

Windows

Operating system version

10 22H2

Additional context

Addition of this feature would provide consistency on the use of colour in the main code and debug output windows and allow greater control from sketches for improved formatting and visualisation of sketch output.

Issue checklist

• I searched for previous requests in the issue tracker
• I verified the feature was still missing when using the latest nightly build
• My request contains all necessary details

[kittaakos]

Thank you for the feature request.

This has already been requested: #1726. Also here: #1991. There is an on-hold PR supporting a subset of the ANSI codes. See why it's on hold: #1992 (comment).

We prefer keeping one open GitHub issue for the same bug/feature request. I close this one as a duplicate. If you have any more details, please comment on the open issues.

I appreciate your understanding!

[tchilton]

This is not a duplicate of the other two requests, those are looking for cursor control and screen clear only, whereas this request is more focused on colour control to make it easier to pick out key info in sketch output and to align to the colour highlighting used elsewhere in the IDE.

I can not see that it is makes any sense to only support one or two ANSI codes, surely you either have ANSI code support, or you do not. A pick and choose approach would lead to confusion and further bug reports.

The other way to do this is to utilise an existing terminal application after the compile and upload completes - configurable by choosing your selected terminal app, most of which provide full terminal capabilities and ANSI codes. Minicom and PuTTY are two common options, but there are many other alternatives

This has already been discussed [in the forums](in the forums), but that is outstanding too.