Open a Browser Tab with DevTools Open by Default

By  on  

Using command line flags is a great way to subtly improve productivity. Whether saving yourself keystrokes or enabling specific features, it's very much worth knowing the application flags available to you.

To launch a new tab with DevTools in Chrome, you can use the --auto-open-devtools-for-tabs command line flag:

/Applications/Google\ Chrome\ Canary.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome\ Canary --auto-open-devtools-for-tabs https://davidwalsh.name

Having the DevTools console immediately launch when opening a new tab can be very helpful, if only to avoid needing to complete the keyboard shortcuts every time you launch a tab. If you're an uber-nerd like me, you're never not in developer mode!

Recent Features

  • By
    An Interview with Eric Meyer

    Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it? At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...

  • By
    How to Create a Twitter Card

    One of my favorite social APIs was the Open Graph API adopted by Facebook.  Adding just a few META tags to each page allowed links to my article to be styled and presented the way I wanted them to, giving me a bit of control...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

  1. zakius

    having to use chromium would greatly overweight the tiny benefit of having dev-tools auto open effectively making everything much worse

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!