I see no way to pause, freeze, or otherwise stop the scrolling of the output in the serial monitor window. This is useful when debugging and you want to examine the results displayed in the window, of course.

You can close the window, or re-upload the sketch, but when a new serial monitor window opens, you have lost the output of the prior one and, thus, the data you are trying to examine.

You can disconnect the USB connection, which halts the output and leaves the window open, but this is crude. At a minimum, it generates an error message on screen, but it can also brutally crash the Mac.

According to the docs for the IDE, clicking the STOP button in the sketch window should stop the serial monitor, but it does not for me.

It would be nice to have a PAUSE/CONTINUE function for the serial window.

FWIW as a workaround (works for me on OS X) selecting text in the window causes the scrolling to stop.

The downside is that there's no way to get the automatic scrolling to resume, you have to manually scroll thereafter.

I'm thinking of implementing this as a checkbox (in the window) w/ wording like "Automatically scroll when new data is received". When checked, the text area would always be scrolled to the bottom. Unchecking it would pause the scrolling, retaining the current text position and allowing you to scroll manually.

That sounds pretty good to me, although it would be nice to try it out to see how it works in practice.

Would it actually be implementing a kind of flow control? Or would messages that came in while the option was unchecked be "lost?"

They'd still appear in the text window, it just wouldn't scroll to them automatically.

I like it. I'll be glad to beta test!

I added a checkbox to disable / enable scrolling of the text area.