Use Logpoints!

By  on  

There's sometimes a tribal attitude about how web developers should be debugging their code and solving problems. There's the console.log loyalists, then there's the debugger/breakpoint maximalists. I worked on the Firefox DevTools debugger for years and I can tell you my philosophy -- use whichever tool helps you get the job done!

I use console.log for very simple problems, other times when I want an audit trail I can analyze after a series of events to spot the problem and share with others. I use breakpoints when I want to halt execution to to see values and the visual state of the UI. One tool you can use to get the best of both worlds is logpoints, a breakpoint-like mechanism in the devtools debugger that logs instead of halts!

To add a logpoint:

  • open the devtools debugger
  • right-click a line number in a JavaScript file,
  • provide the log message accompanied by any variables you'd like in the log:

You have access to all variables in the current context, which you can add to the logpoint message.

You may be asking "why don't you just add a console.log to your source file manually? Oftentimes you need to debug third party scripts where manually editing the file isn't possible. Even if you do have access to the source file, you don't need to do a bunch of console.log cleanup!

Developer tools are always more popular than believe -- take full advantage of them!

Recent Features

  • By
    Write Better JavaScript with Promises

    You've probably heard the talk around the water cooler about how promises are the future. All of the cool kids are using them, but you don't see what makes them so special. Can't you just use a callback? What's the big deal? In this article, we'll...

  • By
    CSS 3D Folding Animation

    Google Plus provides loads of inspiration for front-end developers, especially when it comes to the CSS and JavaScript wonders they create. Last year I duplicated their incredible PhotoStack effect with both MooTools and pure CSS; this time I'm going to duplicate...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Face Detection with jQuery

    I've always been intrigued by recognition software because I cannot imagine the logic that goes into all of the algorithms. Whether it's voice, face, or other types of detection, people look and sound so different, pictures are shot differently, and from different angles, I...

  • By
    jQuery Link Nudging

    A few weeks back I wrote an article about MooTools Link Nudging, which is essentially a classy, subtle link animation achieved by adding left padding on mouseover and removing it on mouseout. Here's how to do it using jQuery: The jQuery JavaScript It's important to keep...

Discussion

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