File this under “how did I not know about this already‽”.

Earlier today, I lamented on Twitter that me having never really learned gdb nor lldb hasn’t served me well when working with the debugger for node.js.

Twitter quickly reasserted its worth, as two people immediately called node-inspector to my attention.

node-inspector, in short, allows you to use Chrome’s JavaScript debugger to debug your Node.js apps. This is the same debugger you may have used to debug your front-end JavaScript.

As I had previously been doing debugging by way of liberal use of console.log(), node-inspector is a revelation. I haven’t felt this free since I switched from writing C++ on the Watcom compiler on DOS to using Visual Studio on Windows.

I expect node-inspector to save me a ton of time in the future.