Whippy Term

WhippyTerm is a modern terminal program. It is written to have a number of modern features such as a tabbed interface, plugin system for extensibility, collapsible side panels to make connection tools easy to access, bookmarks to save your connection settings and preferences per task, and more.

Why

Why make another term program? Well, Whippy Term was started because most of the existing serial terminal programs where from the 90's back when BBS and dial up modems where what you used term programs for. People had kept these programs working, sometimes with new features, sometimes without adding anything.

The things I wanted where:

• Open source
• Multi-platform (at least Windows and Linux)
• Easy to use with a decent GUI
• Core features like ANSI support, logging, file transfers, etc
• A focus on serial com's

After looking around I found Tera Term and Putty on Windows, and Minicom, and Putty on Linux. However none of these fit everything I wanted.

One of the best was Tera Term, but it was Windows only, and the UI is a mashup of Windows 3.11, 95, XP, and more modern UI's. Putty was close but it's really a SSH terminal that can also open a serial port. Tio (which is modern) was still new I didn't find it before I started Whippy Term so I didn't look at it however it (also it doesn't use a GUI).

I should also add a honorable mention for RealTerm as well. This is a good program for looking at and working with binary serial protocols. However it doesn't really do the terminal thing, and is Windows only.

I looked at forking one of these and adding a new GUI and making it multi-platform. I gave this a lot of thought, but in the end I decided that making a new project was going to be easier. And so began Whippy Term.

-- Paul Hutchinson