Description
Describe the request
Show A Port menu item under the Arduino IDE Tools menu even when there are no ports to populate that Tools > Port menu.
🙂 The lack of ports will be communicated to the user in an intuitive manner.
Describe the current behavior
The Arduino IDE's Tools > Port menu is populated by the discovered ports.
An unexpected lack of a port is a common problem for Arduino users. This might happen when the user has a bad USB cable, didn't install the drivers for their board, burned up the board, etc.
Currently, when no ports were discovered the Tools > Port menu item is missing entirely. I feel this is not a great user experience. An empty menu better communicates the lack of a port to the user than the menu itself being absent. The missing menu gives the user the impression there is a fault in the Arduino IDE application rather than a lack of an external resource listed by the menu.
Compare to the behavior of Arduino IDE 1.x under these conditions:
Arduino IDE version
2.0.0-rc1-snapshot.f0d9894
Operating system
Windows
Operating system version
10
Additional context
There are some other menus that are dependent on external resources:
- File > Sketchbook - Equivalent request tracked at If Sketchbook is empty, no Sketchbook menu item is present under File #569
- File > Examples - this will never be empty under normal conditions due to the built-in examples included with the Arduino IDE installation
- Tools > Board - this is unlikely to be empty due to the IDE installing Arduino AVR Boards on first run ([ATL-1294] At first ide startup invoke installation of arduino:avr #497)
Originally reported at https://forum.arduino.cc/t/compilation-fails-due-to-no-upload-port-specified/926836/5
Additional reports: