lser

lser is a fast, cross-platform CLI tool written in Rust that lists all available serial ports on your machine — including USB-to-serial adapters, JTAG probes, and built-in UART controllers.

It reads port metadata directly from the OS (vendor name, product string, USB VID:PID) and presents it in a polished terminal table. Three output formats are supported so lser fits equally well in interactive terminal sessions and automation scripts.

Features

• Beautiful terminal table with Unicode borders (powered by rich_rust)
• --plain: CSV output for use with awk, grep, cut, csvkit, and other text tools
• --json: JSON array output for shell scripts, Python, or any tooling that speaks JSON
• Results sorted alphabetically by port name
• Detects USB vendor/product info and VID:PID automatically
• Falls back to kernel driver name when USB metadata is unavailable
• Supports Linux (x86, x86_64, arm, aarch64) and Windows
• Single static binary, zero configuration

Supported Platforms

Install

cargo install lser

Or download a pre-built binary from the Releases page.

Usage

lser              # default: rich table
lser --plain      # CSV output, pipe-friendly
lser --json       # JSON array for tooling
lser --help       # show help

Default output (rich table)

┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Name         ┃  Vendor   ┃            Product            ┃    USB    ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ /dev/ttyACM0 │ Espressif │ USB JTAG/serial debug unit:00 │ 303a:1001 │
│ /dev/ttyACM1 │  wch.cn   │          WCH-Link:01          │ 1a86:8010 │
└──────────────┴───────────┴───────────────────────────────┴───────────┘

--plain — CSV output

One port per line with a header row. Works with awk, cut, csvkit, etc.

$ lser --plain
name,vendor,product,usb
/dev/ttyACM0,Espressif,USB JTAG/serial debug unit:00,303a:1001
/dev/ttyACM1,wch.cn,WCH-Link:01,1a86:8010

# Example: print only device names
lser --plain | tail -n +2 | cut -d, -f1

--json — JSON output

Outputs a JSON array, ideal for shell scripts or third-party tools.

$ lser --json
[
  {
    "name": "/dev/ttyACM0",
    "vendor": "Espressif",
    "product": "USB JTAG/serial debug unit:00",
    "usb": "303a:1001"
  },
  {
    "name": "/dev/ttyACM1",
    "vendor": "wch.cn",
    "product": "WCH-Link:01",
    "usb": "1a86:8010"
  }
]

# Example: extract all device names with jq
lser --json | jq '.[].name'

Output columns

Fields without information are shown as --.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/rede97/lser.git
cd lser
cargo build --release

The binary will be at target/release/lser.

Dependencies

• serial_enumerator — cross-platform serial port enumeration
• rich_rust — beautiful terminal output (Rust port of Python's Rich)
• clap — command-line argument parsing
• serde / serde_json — JSON serialization

License

MIT — see LICENSE