alt Hacker NewsI am a gray beard and still use Kermit regularly for embedded development. It’s very handy for automating things over a serial port console. I wonder how much adoption it sees with the younger crowd.
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Can you elaborate more on how you use it or do you recommend any codebase to learn more?
I remember evaluating Kermit and ymodem for my embedded work too, but didn't end up using them. Maybe I didn't understand Kermit fully. I wanted something to connect over serial (usb cdc and ble) via the browser and manage files and the state of the device.
I always end up writing something worse and half-baked in the end..
I used Telix under IBM PC-DOS for scripting. The SLT scripts were as versatile as Expect or Tcl in that day.
I used MS-Kermit as a terminal emulator on the same system. I was accessing academic Unix systems and probably also remote access at my first job. MS-Kermit had a keycode translation capability that I used extensively.
My 2400/MNP5 modem sometimes only had a 7-bit connection. Without being 8-bit clean, I couldn’t directly use the Meta key with GNU Emacs. But sometimes I did achieve an 8-N-1 clean connection in the same modem pool!
So I wrote up two large tables for MS-Kermit: one for the 7-bit connection that would send ESC to simulate Meta for Emacs. And one for 8-bit-clean operation that used ALT as Meta and sent the ASCII code >=128.
I eventually submitted them to the GNU Emacs project and one was distributed with Emacs 18. Eventually, they were forced to remove it during a copyright/license cleanup audit. But it was my claim to 15 minutes of fame.
I remember back in the day Kermit was pretty heavyweight. We used sz/rz for file transfer [z-modem: good to see the man pages are still up! https://linux.die.net/man/1/sz]. Is there a reason to prefer Kermit?