IO Ninja 5.2.0 Is Out!
Major release

• System dark UI theme support on macOS and Linux KDE
• Color themes in terminal
• Major redesign and optimization of the rendering engine behind the log, hex editor, and terminal widgets
• Major improvements in xterm compatibility in terminal
• Extended serial port information in all serial-based plugins
• Bash-like navigation over the transmitted packet history
• Support for *.njlog output in the IO Ninja Hardware Client

System Dark UI Theme

Many engineers prefer dark themes in their development tools — for various reasons, from causing less strain on the eyes to simply being aesthetically pleasing. Over the years, we received many requests for dark theme support in IO Ninja. We heard you, so starting with the release v5.2.0, IO Ninja will pick up on the system-wide dark theme. Currently, macOS and Linux with KDE desktops are supported; in the future, we'll take it a step further and allow switching to the dark mode everywhere, and at the user's will.

Terminal Color Themes

Tweaking individual ANSI colors in the IO Ninja terminal emulator was possible before, but only a few users actually did it — it was not quite convenient. Realizing this, we decided to improve the situation by adding a few popular terminal color schemes. These include the Tango theme loved by Linux users, xterm, PuTTY, and a few others. Choose the one you like!

Extended Serial Port Information

Yet another feature asked for by our users. Sometimes, there might be quite a few USB-to-Serial adapters plugged into your laptop — figuring out which one is which could be a challenge! IO Ninja will do its best to help you with this task by providing as many details about a serial device as possible. This includes information on the device path, manufacturer, model, hardware IDs, driver, and location in the system device tree.

Convenient Navigation Over Packet History

A few releases back, we replaced the old (implicit and invisible) transmit history with the dedicated Packet History pane. It was the right thing to do, but there was some collateral damage to it — the ability to navigate back and forth with "Up" and "Down" buttons and Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down shortcuts was gone. But now it's back, and it's better than before! We took the best from both approaches to give you the convenient and intuitive navigation over the list of transmitted packets. Think of what you have in shells like bash, but with the visual history!

Output As *.njlog In Hardware Client

Immediately after the initial release of Hardware Client, people tried using it to capture with a Serial Tap from the command line — but couldn't find a way to generate IO Ninja log files for further analysis. The Hardware Client tool was conceived primarily for remote capture using the ... over SSH plugins and simply didn't support output as *.njlog. Well, until now! In v5.2.0, ioninja-hwc introduces the new --njlog switch for emitting IO Ninja log files directly.