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
    9 Mind-Blowing Canvas Demos

    The <canvas> element has been a revelation for the visual experts among our ranks.  Canvas provides the means for incredible and efficient animations with the added bonus of no Flash; these developers can flash their awesome JavaScript skills instead.  Here are nine unbelievable canvas demos that...

  • 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

  • By
    Record Text Selections Using MooTools or jQuery AJAX

    One technique I'm seeing more and more these days (CNNSI.com, for example) is AJAX recording of selected text. It makes sense -- if you detect users selecting the terms over and over again, you can probably assume your visitors are searching that term on Google...

  • By
    Fancy Navigation with MooTools JavaScript

    Navigation menus are traditionally boring, right? Most of the time the navigation menu consists of some imagery with a corresponding mouseover image. Where's the originality? I've created a fancy navigation menu that highlights navigation items and creates a chain effect. The XHTML Just some simple...

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!