Baudrun

Minimum OS versions

macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel)

Windows (x64 and ARM64)

Linux (amd64 and arm64)

Linux additionally needs a Vulkan-capable GPU with current Mesa drivers.

A cross-platform serial terminal for network devices. Built for switch consoles, router CLIs, and other serial-attached gear. Each device gets a saved profile with its port, baud rate, framing, flow control, line ending, and any send-on-connect sequences. One click connect.

Developed in close collaboration with Claude (Anthropic). See AI-USAGE.md for how that split works.

Documentation

Full reference docs live at packetthrower.github.io/Baudrun. The site covers profiles, themes, skins, highlight-rule authoring, the regex playground, file-transfer protocols, and accessibility. Markdown sources are under docs-next/.

Sample JSON for authoring your own skins, themes, and highlight packs is on the website.

Highlights

• Profiles. Each device gets a saved profile — its port, baud, framing, flow control, line ending, and control-line policy — stored as plain JSON. Drag rows in the sidebar to reorder them. See Profiles.
• USB chipset detection. A VID/PID lookup recognises CP210x, FTDI, PL2303, CH340, MCP2221, and others, and links to the vendor driver when one is missing. CDC-ACM USB-C consoles (HPE/Aruba, newer Cisco, RuggedCom RST2228) work with no driver at all.
• Auto-reconnect. When a USB adapter drops, the session comes back on its own and the scrollback survives the gap.
• Output formatting and capture. Per-line wall-clock timestamps, session-local line numbers, a hex-dump view of incoming bytes, and raw session recording to a file. Each is a per-profile toggle.
• Send Break. A 300 ms TX-low pulse for Cisco ROMMON, Juniper diagnostic mode, and bootloader interrupts.
• File transfer. XMODEM, XMODEM-CRC, XMODEM-1K, and YMODEM, for pushing firmware to embedded bootloaders.
• Paste safety. A confirmation prompt before multi-line pastes, plus a slow-paste mode so UARTs with small buffers don't drop bytes.
• Suspend and resume. Step away from a live session without closing the port; the backlog is waiting when you come back.
• Multi-window. Drag a profile out of the sidebar — past any window edge or onto the terminal pane — and it opens in its own window at the drop point, already connected. Dragging the connected profile moves the live session: port, scrollback, and DTR/RTS state travel with it. Right-click menus do the same without the mouse gesture, and profile edits or reordering in one window show up in every other window immediately.
• Vendor-aware syntax highlighting. Bundled rule packs for Cisco IOS, Juniper Junos, Aruba AOS-CX, Arista EOS, and MikroTik RouterOS, plus a vendor-neutral default. Write your own and test them against real captures in the rule playground.
• 15 terminal themes, 17 app skins. Themes include Dracula, Solarized, Gruvbox, Nord, OneDark, Tokyo Night, and a Colorblind Safe palette built for red-green vision deficiency. Skins include macOS 26 (Liquid Glass), Sidebar Glass, Windows 11, GNOME, KDE, CRT, Cyberpunk, Blueprint, E-Ink, High Contrast, Foundry, and Tokyo Night. Skins and themes are chosen independently.
• Accessibility. Baudrun honours the OS reduce-motion setting, supports keyboard zoom, and keeps every action reachable from the keyboard through customisable shortcuts. A High Contrast skin and a Colorblind Safe theme ship with it. Screen-reader output for the terminal grid is still a gap; the accessibility page has the details.
• Relocatable config directory. Keep your profiles, themes, skins, and settings next to your dotfiles; set the location in Settings → Advanced.

Install

On macOS and Windows, the package managers track the latest stable tag and get you past the first-launch Gatekeeper and SmartScreen warnings. Homebrew, Scoop, and winget also bypass the SmartScreen prompt; winget is Microsoft's own and ships built-in on Windows 10 1809+ and Windows 11.

# macOS — Homebrew (6.0.0+ requires trusting the tap first)
brew tap packetThrower/tap
brew trust packetThrower/tap
brew install --cask baudrun                 # stable
brew install --cask baudrun@alpha           # pre-release

# Windows — winget (Microsoft's package manager, preinstalled)
winget install packetThrower.Baudrun        # or: winget install baudrun

# Windows — Scoop
scoop install git                           # if you don't already have git
scoop bucket add packetThrower https://github.com/packetThrower/scoop-bucket
scoop install baudrun                       # stable
scoop install baudrun-prerelease            # pre-release

The Homebrew and Scoop taps also hold related tools, and Scoop has a separate manifest for the pre-release channel. winget only carries stable; for pre-release builds on Windows, use Scoop or download from Releases directly. Repos: packetThrower/homebrew-tap, packetThrower/scoop-bucket, microsoft/winget-pkgs packetThrower/Baudrun.

Linux users grab the matching .deb / .rpm / .AppImage / .pkg.tar.zst directly from the Releases page. The packages install a udev rule for /dev/ttyUSB* access, so there's no need to add yourself to the dialout group. Arch users can install the .pkg.tar.zst with pacman -U.

To install by hand, download from Releases and drag Baudrun.app to /Applications on macOS, or run the NSIS installer on Windows. The macOS builds are ad-hoc signed, so the first launch needs a right-click → Open (or xattr -cr Baudrun.app); the Windows installer is unsigned, so SmartScreen needs "More info" → "Run anyway". Notarized macOS builds and signed Windows builds are both planned — see TODO.md.

Building from source

Single-crate Rust project at the repo root. The UI is GPUI through GPUI Kit, with alacritty_terminal as the VT parser.

git clone [email protected]:packetThrower/Baudrun.git
cd Baudrun
cargo run                                # dev launch (loopback mode if no port)
cargo run -- /dev/cu.usbserial-XXX       # dev launch attached to a port
cargo build --release                    # optimized binary at target/release/Baudrun

System libraries:

• macOS: brew install libusb pkg-config
• Debian / Ubuntu: sudo apt install libusb-1.0-0-dev libudev-dev pkg-config
• Fedora: sudo dnf install libusb1-devel systemd-devel pkgconf-pkg-config
• Arch: sudo pacman -S libusb pkgconf
• Windows: nothing extra; the gpui DirectX backend ships with Windows 10+.

Project layout

Baudrun/
├── Cargo.toml                # baudrun crate (binary name: Baudrun)
├── src/
│   ├── main.rs               # app entry, menubar / dock, window setup
│   ├── app_view/             # main window: sidebar, profile editor,
│   │                         #   session header, menus, Send File / transfer UI
│   ├── settings_view/        # Settings window (GPUI Kit Settings pages,
│   │                         #   shortcut recorder, theme preview)
│   ├── terminal_view.rs      # alacritty_terminal bridge + grid renderer
│   ├── terminal_grid.rs      # the cell grid the renderer paints from
│   ├── term_bridge.rs        # alacritty → gpui colour / attribute translation
│   ├── settings_bus.rs       # App-scoped settings entity + change broadcast
│   ├── profiles_bus.rs       # cross-window "profiles changed" broadcast
│   ├── skin_tokens.rs        # active-skin token cache (read by every render)
│   ├── highlight_runtime.rs  # line-buffered regex highlighter
│   ├── serial_io.rs          # serial-port read/write threads + write channel
│   ├── updater.rs            # launch-time GitHub Releases check
│   ├── i18n.rs               # locale detection + supported languages
│   └── data/                 # pure-Rust data layer (no UI deps)
│       ├── profiles.rs       # JSON-backed profile store + validation
│       ├── settings.rs       # global settings store
│       ├── themes/           # theme store + .itermcolors plist parser
│       ├── skins.rs          # skin store + CSS-var validation
│       ├── highlight.rs      # rule-pack store
│       ├── sanitize.rs       # session-log sanitizer
│       ├── transfer.rs       # XMODEM / YMODEM state machines
│       ├── hex.rs            # Send Hex input parser
│       ├── serial/           # port enumeration + chipset detection
│       ├── usbserial/        # libusb-direct backend (CP210x)
│       └── appdata.rs        # OS config-directory resolution
├── resources/                # bundled at compile time
│   ├── Info.plist            # macOS bundle metadata
│   ├── icons/                # .icns / .ico / .png set
│   ├── builtin_skins.json    # 16 built-in app skins
│   ├── builtin_themes.json   # 15 built-in terminal themes
│   ├── fonts/                # bundled JetBrains Mono
│   └── highlight/            # bundled vendor rule packs
├── locales/                  # UI strings (en, zh-CN); see locales/README.md
├── build/                    # icon source + Windows installer assets
├── packaging/                # Linux udev rule + .desktop file + Arch PKGBUILD
├── scripts/                  # dev tools (each its own Cargo workspace)
│   ├── virtual-serial/       # baud-paced virtual pty pair for testing
│   └── transfer-tests/       # headless harness for XMODEM / YMODEM / hex
├── test/                     # tracked fixtures for the test harness
│   ├── transfers/            # deterministic binary + hex payloads
│   └── json/                 # JSON packs for Settings → Import smoke tests
├── docs-next/                # Astro/Starlight docs site source
│   └── public/examples/      # sample skin / theme / highlight-pack JSON
└── .github/workflows/        # CI + release + docs deploy

CI (.github/workflows/ci.yml) runs cargo check / clippy / test across macOS, Windows, and Linux on every push. Release (.github/workflows/release.yml) builds .dmg / NSIS / .deb / .rpm / .AppImage / .pkg.tar.zst bundles via cargo-packager on every tag and attaches them to the GitHub Releases page. The docs workflow (docs.yml) deploys the Astro site to GitHub Pages on changes under docs-next/.

Testing

Two complementary layers.

Unit tests (cargo test) cover pure-data invariants — JSON round-trips, parser edge cases, protocol checksum / CRC, the hex-input validator, the highlight runtime. Fast, no I/O, run on every CI push.

Wire-level transfer tests drive Baudrun's actual XMODEM / YMODEM / Send-Hex code paths against a baud-paced virtual pty pair, then byte-diff what arrives at the other end against deterministic fixtures. See scripts/transfer-tests/ for the harness and scripts/virtual-serial/TESTING.md for the manual playbook the same fixtures back. Unix-only — pty primitives don't exist on Windows.

# one-time setup
(cd scripts/virtual-serial  && cargo build --release)
(cd scripts/transfer-tests  && cargo build --release)

# run all 11 cases (~144 s wall) or pass --quick to skip T9 (~18 s)
./scripts/transfer-tests/target/release/transfer-tests

Last verified 2026-05-15 on macOS arm64 (Apple Silicon) against virtual-serial at the throttled baud rates shown:

Test	What	Baud	Wall	Result
T1	hex ASCII (Hello)	9 600	0.01 s	ok
T3	hex binary / non-printable (00 01 02 ff fe 7f)	9 600	0.01 s	ok
T5	hex 1 KiB random	9 600	1.35 s	ok
T11	YMODEM 512 B over slow link	9 600	5.92 s	ok
T6	YMODEM 4 KiB	115 200	3.69 s	ok
T9	YMODEM 1 MiB	115 200	126.00 s	ok
T7c	XMODEM classic (128 B / checksum)	115 200	1.56 s	ok
T7C	XMODEM-CRC (128 B / CRC-16)	115 200	1.56 s	ok
T7k	XMODEM-1K (1024 B / CRC-16)	115 200	1.55 s	ok
T8	XMODEM single-block (SUB padding)	115 200	1.08 s	ok
T10	YMODEM cancel mid-transfer	115 200	1.18 s	ok

11 / 11 passed, 143.9 s wall. T9 dominates the run time; the other ten cases together finish in under 18 seconds. Each test maps to a section in TESTING.md — the harness exists so the same playbook can be run unattended.

The harness lifts src/data/transfer.rs verbatim via #[path], so it exercises the same XMODEM / YMODEM state machines Baudrun ships — protocol-level regressions surface at the next cargo build of the harness without any manual sync step. See scripts/transfer-tests/README.md for the full design and flag reference, and test/transfers/ for the deterministic payload set.

License

GNU General Public License v3.0 or later. Forks are welcome; derivative works must stay open under the same license. Commercial use is permitted but can't close the source.