I came across Tim Holman's console.frog project a while back and realized I'd been depriving myself of a lot of great amphibious development practices. I began to think about why console.frog felt so right after so much time programming, and came to the realization that it's not just frogs I've been missing, but that nowadays coding is too far removed from nature as a whole.
console.frog is to a log message as breathing through one's skin is to a prince: now they're frogs. However, developers can still write boring, artificial logs, so console.log is intended to change that.
In a nutshell, console.log overrides console.log to add more puns. It's written in ES6 with no dependencies, and its logging potential is best illustrated in Chrome (for both aesthetic and browser support reasons).
Traditional use of console.log works as follows:
console.log("I am a 'log'");
> I am a 'log'
The new and improved console.log carves that log message into an ASCII art representation of a felled tree (colored dark brown, of course) and gently rests it in the debugger:
Multi-line and -argument messages are placed into a logpile:
And finally, a reminder to stay environmentally conscious when logging for no good reason:
Just include console.log.js in your application, and voilà , natural-looking logs that occasionally make you feel just the right bit of shame for contributing to the environmental decline of our planet.
In an effort to reduce space and cozy up logpiles, logs are single-line with bark of text-decoration: overline underline; which makes the carving look tight, but still legible.
Unfortunately it appears modern web consoles don't respect the letter-spacing CSS property. This reduces the uniformity of logs.
console.log joins its arguments, so it will not respect developers' own stylistic choices.
Copyright 2018 Duncan McIsaac
The MIT License