I guess minicom is a 'nice to have'. It certainly would have been nice for me to have when I wanted to connect my laptop/desktop into the console port of a Cisco device. Well, can't complain too much, at least joe (Joe's own editor) was part of the package.

The idea to make it small and accessible will make it small and accessible, so there is little room for 'nice to haves'. The target market is definitely not the general LINUX community, so there will be no compile tools and little command line stuff. I think the idea is that my mother could install it and use it well on her P1. It autodetects _most_ commercially available hardware and is a great alternative to a couple of hundred dollars worth of competitive products.