Picocom is invoked to talk to a serial port like so: picocom -baud 38400 /dev/tty. It installs just two files – /opt/local/bin/picocom and /opt/local/share/man/man8/picocom.8.gz Ensure you have your latest graphics card drivers installed before use. The project is experimental at the moment, so you probably wont want to rely on Aminal as your main terminal for a while. It installs in /opt/local/bin by default, but this could be easily moved to /usr/local/bin if you want somewhere that’s in the default path. Aminal is a modern terminal emulator for Mac/Linux/Windows implemented in Golang and utilising OpenGL. I’ve built this binary installer package for picocom 1.6 so that I can easily install picocom on any system I need to. If you don’t have these prerequisites, installing a couple of gig of Developer Tools just to compile and install a terminal emulator that’s a few tens of kb in size seems like overkill. Picocom is available as part of the MacPorts project, so is trivial to install on any system with the Developer Tools and MacPorts installed. I was previously using screen, which is shipped with Mac OS X and makes for a good terminal program, but screen doesn’t play well with the scrollback buffer in Mac OS X’s Terminal app.

I’m finding I need to do more stuff talking to a serial port, and picocom seems to be the best terminal emulator I’ve found for Mac OS X.

Screen terminal emulator mac binary