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Comment by undergrowth54 | Hacker News Reader

The author's frustration with the lack of customizable shortcuts is my biggest issue with chrome devtools as well. This is especially frustrating when I just want to pop a debugger statement in the middle of a node.js unit test so I can step through things, but node.js requires that you use the browser for debugging. (EDIT: apparently there is an IDE from jetbrains[1] that lets you do this too) This past Friday I started poking around to see what it would take to write a terminal-based browser in the style of the python debugger and found that the v8 team at Google has been working making the debugger separable from the browser since at least February of this year[2].

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/

[2] https://github.com/nodejs/node/commit/14174a95a597cac7b848fe...

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We've recently been cleaning up our keyboard shortcut implementation in DevTools. The end goal is definitely enabling customizable shortcuts and we're definitely targeting those step-wise debugging usecases. Star to get updates: http://crbug.com/174309

Also, visual studio community edition is free[1] can debug nodejs with an extension[2]. And the capability is integrated into VS Code[3] which works cross-platform.

Those and webstorm/intellij are the ones I have experience with. But most of the time, I just use the CLI debugger -- it's not hard.

[1] https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-co...

[2] https://github.com/Microsoft/nodejstools

[3] https://code.visualstudio.com/

Which CLI debugger are you talking about? I thought one didn't exist

It has a built-in debugger that you start using `node debug /path/to/script`. See more here: https://nodejs.org/api/debugger.html

> node.js requires that you use the browser for debugging

wat? :/

Node.js does not require you to use the browser for debugging. But you're probably referring to node-inspector, which uses Chrome or Opera. I personally find webstorm to be wayyy easier debugging node unit tests specifically.

~~Is webstorm usable outside a jetbrains product? In particular, on a headless server?~~

EDIT: That was a dumb question. This IDE looks pretty cool. I'll check it out. But I still want something that I can run headless.

Since debugging is over a TCP connection, you only have to start the nodejs process with the debug flag, and then plug the address and port into whatever debugger you're trying to use.

In addition to the standard debugger, WebStorm also give you SpyJS for Node[1], which is a Tracer/Reverse debugger.

[1] http://blog.jetbrains.com/webstorm/2014/08/tracing-debugging...

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