Hello.

Have you ever wanted to show someone something really cool in javascript, maybe an extra sexy reduce or a cool syntactical trick? Of course you did. You wrote your code, and it turned out fucking rad. Now how do you send this that special somebody?

Sites like jsbin and codepen are cool for showing off full-blown demos. But you want to show off some juicy javascript. You probaly hacked it around in the dev tools of the browser of your choice, because they are a great environment for just playing around with javascript.

But what if you could have a javascript console...in your browser?

And then share that hacking around session with those you love (or hate (or feel no particular emotion for))?

http://jsh.zirak.me . It could take a bit to load.


What is this?

As the introduction above says, this is Chrome's dev tools javascript console in a regular web page. To see how it was done, see the How stuff works section below.

Write some javascript, invite your friends, write some javascript on your friends. You'll be the life of the party.

It's quite alpha but usable. Things work generally pretty well on Chrome, Firefox has some jitters, IE will likely stay a mess for some time.

Features

What you'd expect of Chrome dev tools' excellent console:

• JavaScript REPL
• Object inspection
• Completion suggestions
• Nice stack traces
• History
• Monkeys

Roadmap

• Introduction message
• Saving and sharing
• Implement ---all--- most console methods (dir, group, table, time, ...)
• Find functionality
• Make it work across modern-ish browsers
• Inspect nodes.
• Stream a session (like TogetherJS)
• Themes (?)
• Settings (?)
• Better editing (tab button support)

Running

A bit unfortunately, this is meant to run on Google App Engine, so to run you'll need to download the SDK for Python.

Unzip/install/whatever, and run:

$ python2.7 path/to/google_appengine/dev_appserver.py path/to/jsh

(if 2.7 is already your Python version you can omit that first part.)

Pay a visit to localhost:8080 and have fun.

How stuff works

The best way to learn how the dev tools works is by looking at the source and playing around with it. The sources here are taken freshly squeezed from chromium/chromium@66fbff9d3e1c441db581024895a959efc32deac2 . You can find it in third_party/WebKit/devtools/front_end. May God have mercy on your soul.

(Yes, I'm planning on writing my findings down.)

Poke around, understand that InspectorFrontendHost and some other objects are actually native bindings, be angry that that's the case. Raaaargh!!!!

You can actually inspect the dev-tools using the dev-tools. Hit Ctrl-Shift-J and undock them if necessary. Then, simply hit Ctrl-Shift-J again. Have fun.

To make things even more fun, in your inceptioned dev tools, run:

InspectorBackendClass.Options.dumpInspectorProtocolMessages = true;

And proceed to do things. The bazingaload of messages you'll see are part of the protocol.

I wrote this clone by first including what seemed like obvious core console functionality (that is, everything in the console directory), followed by main/Main.js (because hey, it's main), and then started to slowly (ssllloooowwwllllyyyy) fix the ReferenceErrors and TypeErrors.

This means that while at its base the console "works", there are a lot of hidden booby-traps and unimplemented functionality. At the same time, there is a lot of code which just isn't useful (why do we need a VBox and the SplitView and the tabs pane and so forth?). The way forward is implementing more and more console related functionality while trimming unnecessary portions.

All messages to the native backend funnel down to jsh.handleMessage.

Structure

Frontend is in the public/ directory; /templates and the rest are Google App Engine boilerplate.

The directory structure is also of course copied directly from the dev tools' source. I don't quite get it either. It's a mess.

If you want a starting point to hack things around, the index file is a bad place to start. It's just a blob of scripts.

jsh.js is one place, as it contains the code for dealing with messages ("evaluate this expression", "give me the properties of this object").

InjectedScript.js contains most if not all of the interesting logic.

main/Main.js is where most things happen: Settings up the UI, settings up the different objects the UI uses. It's mostly baloney, though.

sdk/ConsoleModel.js is where the runtime/console API gets tied up to the UI, and the good friends in the console/ folder are where all the console UI logic is done.

It's a lot of being confusing and greping for things.

What happens when I press enter?

That's a very good question. It all starts from public/js/concole/ConsoleView.js, in a nice little function called _promptKeyDown. Oh look, _enterKeyPressed, that looks simple!

And then it's HELL. Let's go through a partial trace (which is of course broken at times because async, and partial because I'm not doing a full call graph):

1. ConsoleView.._promptKeyDown

2. ConsoleView.._enterKeyPressed

3. ConsoleView.._appendCommand

4. ConsoleModel.evaluateCommandInConsole

5. ExecutionContext..evaluate

   (lots of redirections between this and next)

6. InspectorBackendClass.AgentPrototype..registerCommand#sendMessage

7. InspectorBackendClass.AgentPrototype.._sendMessageToBackend

8. InspectorBackendClass.MainConnection.._wrapCallbackAndSendMessageObject

9. InspectorBackendClass.StubConnection..sendMessage

   This is where we come in. We're a StubConnection because our backend isn't the real native backend Chrome has. But we'll show it! Next part will change as jsh changes.

10. jsh.handleMessage

11. jsh#sendMessageToEvalFrame

    And from now on we've passed control to the eval frame. Until further notice all functions are one there.

12. messageListener

13. actions.bridge

14. bridge.evaluate

15. eval (finally!)

16. sendToParent

    Aaannndd back to the jsh frame.

17. messageListener

    Aaannndd this is where jsh leaves off.

18. InspectorBackendClass.MainConnection..dispatch

    ...lots of indirections...

19. ExecutionContext..evaluate#evalCallback

20. ConsoleModel.evaluateCommandInConsole#printResult

21. ConsoleView.._commandEvaluated

22. ConsoleView.._printResult

...and it just goes boring UI from here. Real nice, right?

wat

To give you a hand, here are some useful variables to have.

• You're going to see target this and target that a lot. You can get it like this: WebInspector.targetManager.targets()[0]
• Same goes for connection or _connection: InspectorBackend.connection()
• ConsoleView: WebInspector.ConsolePanel._view()

And it's late now so I can't think of anything else.

License

99% of the files here have a giant license block at the top. Basically, it's directly from the dev tools source. This goes for any images in css/Images.

Favicon is from Github's Octicon set. Expect a new one.

Any code I write is under the WTFPL.