04 December 2012

Web developer spent considerable amount of time working on browser console. You could be working mostly on Firefox Firebug or Chrome Developer Console. It’s good to learn a trick or two to speed up development.

I learned this from Egor Homakov. We were smoking shisha when he decided to pull out his machine and get some work done. And while he was at it, he showed us few tricks.

The first one was $0. The command will return the most recently selected node to console. You just have to go to Elements, click on a node and type $0 in console. You can also type $1 to return the previously selected element. Then $2 and so on.

If you’ve been a good developer and bothered to check https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/console then you’ve probably already noticed this. I have never been to that page until today.

But, he did show something else too. $_ to get the last returned value in console. Similar to _ in irb.

  > 2 + 2
  => 4
  > var b = $_
  => undefined
  > b
  => 4

And that one wasn’t documented in https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/console yet. Not supported by Firebug’s Command Line API too.