After clicking “Start Monitoring” to open the connection, keypresses are not directed to the “Type in a message to send to the serial port.” field.
This is obvious and a natural user-expectation. And yet…
For usage/workflow, there are three extremely common paths after starting the monitor:
A) the device is writing progress info to serial, watch the output
B) the device is waiting for serial data, type…press enter, see output
C) some lovely combination of A & B
An automatic change of focus after the monitor is started would enhance the experience of B/C and would not alter A.
Currently if one starts typing, ordinary keypresses are ignored until enter is pressed at the end of the line - this presses the (now) “Stop Monitoring” button. I can see some minor utility in this. This behavior would be lost with an automatic change in focus. Yet, that same utility remains, and is easily reached by clicking the mouse button again.
So, upside described, downside examined. I would argue it is a good case for a useful feature. It is hard for me to imagine this has not been raised before, yet my spelunking through the discussion has yielded no mention on topic.
Why does this aspect of the Serial Monitor operation remain unaddressed?
1)Is the terminal window used by platformio also “part of vscode” and “not part of platformio”?
can a different plugin to provide the serial output window be used instead of the stock one from vscode? Or, are all the details of what-plugin-provides-serial-monitor found in platformio’s code base or vscode’s?
