Of course, check the Examples file (tool usage) as well as the examples/ directory for third party examples
By default, the serial connection uses a 9600 baud with 8N1 - this means maximal 960 bytes/s raw data rate.
Due to the limitations of a line-wise file upload, these maximal transfer rate cannot be reached, because every line has to be processed by the lua interpreter and NodeMCU-Tool is waiting for it's response.
It's recommended to use the --minify flag to minify the code before uploading. Additionally, newer firmware versions 1.x.x using an auto-baudrate detection algorithm - this means you can increase the baudrate to e.g. 115200 --baud 115200 to speed up the transfer
Additionally include the native encoder Module into your firmware to speed-up the uploading by factor 4..10!