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Changelog

All notable changes to Serial Monitor Pro are documented here.

[0.7.0] — 2026-05-18​

When you open a recorded session, the playback panel now lands at the end of the timeline so the full serial log is rendered up front. This lets you tell at a glance whether you opened the right session — no need to scrub or press Play just to check. Hitting Play still rewinds to 00:00 and plays from the start, courtesy of the existing v0.5.0 end-of-session detection.

Changed​

  • Playback opens at the end of the timeline. Previously, opening a session left the cursor at 00:00 and the output area empty until you pressed Play or scrubbed. The cursor now lands at session.duration on open, so every event up to the end is already visible. Sessions with duration === 0 or missing duration still open at 00:00 (no regression).

Internal​

  • New pure helper initialCursorMs(session) lives in media/playback-core.js next to the existing isAtEnd helper, matching the established UMD + node:test pattern. Unit-tested in tests/playback-core.test.mjs for positive, zero, missing, null, NaN, and negative durations.

[0.6.0] — 2026-05-17​

One-click "throw it out" for a recording you didn't want — without modal dialogs and without losing the recording if you change your mind. When a recording is saved, both the VS Code toast and the in-monitor log line now offer Open and Discard actions. Discard removes the session from the sidebar immediately and shows an Undo toast; if you don't undo, the recording is permanently deleted the next time you start another recording, close VS Code, or perform another discard. The Recorded Sessions sidebar gets the same flow via a new right-click Delete Session action.

Added​

  • Discard button on saved-recording toast and log line. After a recording is saved (either manually via the Stop button or automatically on disconnect), the existing "Recording saved" notification now includes Open and Discard buttons, and the corresponding --- Recording saved: <name> --- line in the monitor output has matching inline buttons. The inline buttons are CSP-safe (rendered as real <button> elements, not via innerHTML).
  • Soft-delete with undo. Clicking Discard moves the session directory to a tombstone path (.discarded-session-<id>) so it disappears from the Recorded Sessions sidebar instantly, then shows a Recording discarded: <name> toast with an Undo button. Clicking Undo restores the session. The tombstone is permanently deleted (rm -rf) when the user starts another recording, performs another discard, or closes VS Code.
  • Delete Session context menu on items in the Recorded Sessions sidebar, using the same soft-delete + undo flow. Right-click a session → Delete Session.
  • Playback panel auto-closes on discard. If a recording's Playback panel is open when the session is discarded (from the monitor flow or the sidebar), the panel is automatically closed so it doesn't keep stale file handles on the soft-deleted session directory.

Internal​

  • New src/recording/sessionDiscardCore.js pure-JS file-system module owns the rename / restore / finalize / find-orphans primitives so they can be unit-tested without vscode. Tested by tests/sessionDiscardCore.test.mjs.
  • New src/recording/sessionDiscardService.ts TypeScript wrapper layers VS Code concerns (toast lifecycle, sessions-tree refresh, single-slot pending state) on the core.
  • extension.ts calls SessionDiscardService.gcOrphans() at activation so any .discarded-session-* directory left behind by a crash is cleaned up.
  • tests/manifest.test.mjs now asserts that the serialMonitorPro.deleteSession command and its view/item/context menu entry are both contributed.

[0.5.0] — 2026-05-17​

Recording is now on by default: connecting to a port automatically starts a session and disconnecting saves it, so you never lose a debug session because you forgot to hit Record. The monitor toolbar is also reorganized to put Connect/Disconnect on the left where the eye lands first. Plus a small playback UX fix.

Added​

  • Auto-record on connect. A new Auto-record on connect checkbox in the monitor toolbar (ticked by default) makes connecting to a port automatically start a recording, and disconnecting automatically stop and save it. Configured via serialMonitorPro.autoRecordOnConnect, so the preference travels with VS Code Settings Sync — untick the box if you prefer to start recordings manually.

Changed​

  • Monitor toolbar reorganized. Connect/Disconnect (with the connection-status indicator) now live on the left of the primary toolbar, with the connection-settings selects (baud rate, line ending, data bits, stop bits, parity) on the right. The primary action is now where the eye lands first.

Fixed​

  • Pressing Play at the end of a session now restarts playback from 00:00 instead of being a no-op. Previously, when playback reached session.duration the loop clamped currentTimeMs to the end and paused; clicking ▶ again called startPlayback(), but the very next frame the loop saw currentTimeMs >= session.duration and immediately paused again. The play handler now detects the end-of-session state and seeks to 0 before resuming.

Internal​

  • Extracted the end-of-session check into a new pure helper module (media/playback-core.js), exported UMD-style so the webview script and Node node:test runner can share it — matching the existing media/waveform-core.js pattern.
  • New unit tests in tests/playback-core.test.mjs cover isAtEnd for at/past/before the end, zero duration, missing duration, and start-of-playback.
  • Auto-record start/stop is implemented in the extension host on the existing port-open/close events, so a port going away unexpectedly (e.g. cable unplugged mid-recording) still saves the session.

[0.4.0] — 2026-05-15​

Hotfix release for the "There is no data provider registered that can provide view data." error that marketplace users saw in the Serial Ports view immediately after installing v0.3.0. The published .vsix was missing its serialport runtime, so the extension could not finish loading; this release ships the runtime correctly and adds regression tests so the bug class cannot return.

Fixed​

  • "No data provider registered" error in the Serial Ports view for marketplace installs. The published .vsix was being packaged without serialport and its native-binding helpers, so loading the extension threw MODULE_NOT_FOUND before activate() could run — leaving the contributed tree views with no data provider attached. The runtime tree is now preserved in the packaged extension.

Changed​

  • serialport is now loaded lazily. A missing or broken native binding can no longer prevent the extension from activating — the error surfaces in the existing port-refresh flow instead, with a real user-visible message.
  • The Serial Ports and Recorded Sessions views register placeholder providers immediately on activation, then swap in the real ones once initialization succeeds. If anything during init throws, the UI now shows a real error message instead of VS Code's cryptic default.

Internal​

  • Added a static manifest test that locks the invariants between package.json, esbuild externals, and .vscodeignore.
  • Added a packaging integration test (npm run package:verify) that runs vsce package, unzips the result, and asserts every runtime external resolves from the packaged extension. This would have caught the v0.3.0 regression before publish.
  • Added an activation test that asserts both contributed view IDs are registered with non-null TreeDataProviders before activate() returns.
  • npm run package:verify runs in CI before the marketplace publish step.

Known Issues​

  • The published .vsix ships only the host CI's platform-specific native bindings for @serialport/bindings-cpp. CI currently builds on Ubuntu, so macOS and Windows users may still see a MODULE_NOT_FOUND for the binding when the extension tries to list ports. The fix is to publish platform-specific .vsix files via vsce package --target per platform; tracked as a follow-up.

[0.3.0] — 2026-05-15​

This release focuses on the playback experience: the timeline now shows an audio waveform of your recorded commentary, markers are usable again with a much nicer UX, and the Recorded Sessions list refreshes itself when a recording stops. Two client-side XSS issues in the playback webview (flagged by CodeQL) are also fixed.

Added​

  • Audio waveform timeline. The playback timeline now renders the session's audio commentary as a 96-pixel waveform track, with the RX/TX event ticks moved into a slim 8-pixel strip below. Waveforms are decoded from the session's audio.wav in the webview, peak-bucketed, and drawn to a canvas — so the visualization scales with the timeline width and updates as you resize the panel.
  • No-audio fallback for playback. Sessions recorded without SoX (or with the microphone unavailable) render an empty waveform track instead of failing to load, keeping the rest of the playback UI fully functional.
  • Inline marker rename. Click a marker label in the marker list to edit it in place. Enter or blur saves, Escape cancels, empty/unchanged values revert to the previous label.
  • Auto-numbered marker labels. New markers are added immediately with a default Marker N label, ready to be renamed in the list.
  • Stable marker IDs. Markers now carry an optional id field in manifest.json for stable identification across rename and remove operations. Sessions saved before v0.3.0 have IDs back-filled automatically on load — existing recordings continue to work without any migration step.
  • Wider marker pin hit area. Marker pins on the timeline now have a 16-pixel hit area (up from 2 pixels) while keeping the visible glyph centered on the marker timestamp, making them much easier to grab.
  • Automated Marketplace publishing. Pushing a version tag on main now triggers a GitHub Actions workflow that builds and publishes the extension to the VS Code Marketplace.

Fixed​

  • Recorded Sessions list now refreshes after a recording finishes (#2). Previously the new session would not appear in the sidebar until you manually clicked refresh.
  • Adding markers in playback works again. The old "Add Marker" flow called window.prompt for a label, but window.prompt is blocked in VS Code webviews and silently returns null, so the handler bailed out before sending anything to the extension host. Markers are now added immediately with an auto-numbered label and renamed inline.
  • CSP error that prevented the waveform from loading. The playback webview's Content Security Policy was adjusted to allow the new waveform.js resource while still blocking inline scripts.

Security​

  • Fixed two client-side XSS issues in the playback webview flagged by CodeQL. Marker labels and other session-derived strings are now rendered via safe DOM APIs rather than innerHTML, and the session storage layer rejects manifests with unexpected shapes.
  • Locked down GitHub Actions permissions for the Marketplace publish workflow to the minimum required (contents: read).

Internal​

  • ESLint is now configured for the TypeScript sources (npm run lint).
  • Unit tests run via the built-in node:test runner (npm test); new tests cover the WAV header parser, PCM peak bucketer, sine-wave amplitude handling, and stereo downmix used by the waveform.

[0.1.0] — 2026-04-28​

Added​

  • Serial port monitoring panel with configurable baud rate, data bits, stop bits, parity, and line ending
  • Timeline recording — captures every RX/TX event with millisecond-precision timestamps
  • Simultaneous microphone audio recording via SoX (optional)
  • Session playback panel with variable speed (0.25×–10×), seek bar, and synchronized audio
  • Annotation markers on the playback timeline
  • Session management sidebar — lists all recorded sessions, stored as plain directories
  • Custom baud rate support via serialMonitorPro.customBaudRates setting
  • Graceful degradation when SoX is unavailable — serial recording continues without audio