CoolTerm: Text progress bar in connected terminal.

[McG800]

Hello everyone,
I'm using CoolTerm (on macOS) to connect to a Sun machine via serial connection. While Solaris is loading, it does a progress bar (circle maybe?). The one where, /-\|/-/ (etc...) display quickly so it looks like a spinning wheel. In CoolTerm, each character shows up as a new line. Instead of being overwritten. I've played around with the settings and I'm unable to find the correct one to make it behave as expected. Can somebody point me in the correct direction? I've attached a screenshot.



Thanks everyone!
-McG

[roger]

Hi,

CoolTerm doesn't support terminal emulations such as VT100 or similar which include commands to format the screen. Thus, it will not interpret escape sequences to clear the screen, etc. However, I wonder if Solaris perhaps sends back delete or backspace characters. If so, then CoolTerm can interpret those if enabled. Turn on the 'Handle BS or DEL' characters under 'Special Character Handling' in the connection settings and see if that makes a difference. If not, I would also suggest switching CoolTerm to hex mode to see what ASCII codes are being received during the spinning wheel sequence. This might provide a clue as to what other options to address this might be.

[McG800]

Hey Roger,
I enabled 'Handle BS and DEL' option. Unfortunately, it didn't work. Here is a screenshot of the hex output. This isn't a big deal, I only really ever see it during boot. I was just hoping there would be an option clean it up a bit.

[roger]

Interesting. It seems like Solaris is doing two different things when it's spinning the wheel. During the first half it's sending carriage returns (0D). CoolTerm simply interprets those as new lines. However, during the 2nd half to the screenshot it sends back backspaces (08) after every character. So at least during that time, CoolTerm should show the animation correctly, provided that handling of BS and DEL is enabled.

[McG800]

Hello Roger,
I do have that option enabled by default: