Christian Heilmann

Dear Console,…

Thursday, September 29th, 2022 at 3:52 pm

The browser developer tools Console is so much more than a place to log your messages. It is a way for you to programatically access the currently shown document and window, read out values and change them. On top of that, it has a powerful API of helper methods to make that easier than with vanilla JavaScript.

Over the years, I wrote dozens of helper scripts that I use in the Console or as Snippets in the browser to make my day to day work easier. And lately I started tweeting about them using a “Dear Console,…” moniker. People seemed to like that so I started to collect these links on a Dear Console,… web site.

The Dear console web site.

On this site you can:

  • see all the scripts with explanations what they do
  • either click each of them to see the code, or copy them directly using the copy icon
  • paste them into the Console on web sites you want to query or change and hit enter

Here’s what that looks like in action:

screen recording of how to interact with the page

You can also filter the scripts by tag and you can use them in your own snippets .

The site is hosted on GitHub , and I welcome any issues and pull requests there.

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Newsletter

Check out the Dev Digest Newsletter I write every week for WeAreDevelopers. Latest issues:

160: Graphs and RAGs explained and VS Code extension hacks Graphs and RAG explained, how AI is reshaping UI and work, how to efficiently use Cursor, VS Code extensions security issues.
159: AI pipelines, 10x faster TypeScript, How to interview How to use LLMs to help you write code and how much electricity does that use? Is your API secure? 10x faster TypeScript thanks to Go!
158: 🕹️ Super Mario AI 🔑 API keys in LLMs 🤙🏾 Vibe Coding Why is AI playing Super Mario? How is hallucinating the least of our worries and what are rules for developing Safety Critical Code?
157: CUDA in Python, Gemini Code Assist and back-dooring LLMs We met with a CUDA expert from NVIDIA about the future of hardware, we look at how AI fails and how to play pong on 140 browser tabs.
156: Enterprise dead, all about Bluesky and React moves on! Learn about Bluesky as a platform, how to build a React App and how to speed up SQL. And play an impossible game in the browser.

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