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Language-agnostic debugging widgets based on print statements.
The idea is that you often use log statements while you're debugging, really lightweight stuff like System.out.println("new value: " + val) to make sure that your code does what you think it does. But because you print to a console, the "widgets" you can use are fairly primitive:
Notification / status indicator. Example (JavaScript): console.log('loading data...')
List. Example (Java): list.stream().forEach(System.out.println)
Table. Example (OCaml): List.iter (fun (a, b) -> print_endline (a ^ "\t" ^ b)) list
debugview lets you add special commands to your log statements that give you easy access to a broader widget library:
HTML. Example (C): printf("<<<html <h2>Now the fun part...</h2> >>>\n"); adds a row to a table
(Aligned) Table. Example (JavaScript): console.log('<<<tr ' + fields.join('|') + '>>>') adds a row to a table
Bar chart. Example (JavaScript): console.log('<<<bar ' + value + '>>>') adds a bar to a bar chart
Installation
npm install -g debugview
Usage: Language-agnostic
Just pipe your program through debugview. Your program's output will still show in the terminal, but it will launch a web browser that shows the same content with all the debugview commands interpreted as tables, bar charts, etc.
$ yourprogram | debugview
If you want to see it go, try an example:
$ node example01.js | debugview
Usage: Browser JavaScript
Start debugview in remote mode:
$ debugview --remote
It will print a <script> tag for you to insert in your page. When you load the page, debugview will open a new browser window to show the log in.
The Future
debugview barely exists. I wrote just enough to convince myself it could work, so it's pretty hacky and under-documented. See TODO.markdown for things I'm planning.
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Language-agnostic debugging widgets based on print statements
