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There's more than just console.log()....other useful ways to use the console in javascript

Buddy Agyin 🦁 on September 30, 2020

Update: After some requests from some of you I also added some ways for you to style your console outputs. Check out Facebook's console to see styl...

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Andrea Disperati • Oct 1 '20

Hi, this article is going to be very useful, thank you.
I do have a question though. I encountered this problem not a long time ago but I couldn't find an answer to it.
When I run this on the Chrome console:

console.time("Timer1: ")
for(let i=0; i<100000; i++){
   console.log('test')
}
console.timeEnd("Timer1: ")

it takes around 35 seconds to display on Chrome console the result which is around 5000 ms.
Does this mean that while the (V8?) takes 5 seconds to run the code, Chrome console is much slower to show the result of all iterations?

Matthew Pardini • Oct 2 '20 • Edited

Printing to the console is slow. Yes. Have you tried the same thing without a .log in the loop? Probably much much faster

Andrea Disperati • Oct 2 '20

Yep, just tried as you suggested and it turned out that an addition without console.log() is roughly 2500 times faster. I got it, thank you.

Matthew Pardini • Oct 2 '20

This isn’t specific to chrome

Zac Smith • Sep 30 '20

Excellent, I love .table() and now I have some new console tools to use! Great job and great clarity in your style.

Buddy Agyin 🦁 • Sep 30 '20

.table() has become one of my new favorites, it makes viewing datasets much easier

Tassoman • Oct 2 '20

Using console.info('my message') you can deliver my message 😆

Ipan Ardian • Sep 30 '20

Nice info

Matthew Pardini • Oct 2 '20 • Edited

I love using css colors and sizing in my logging when I have a lot of noise. console.log(“%cMy Message”, color: “red”) will print a red colored My Message.

Thanks for the tips

Buddy Agyin 🦁 • Oct 2 '20

This is something I actually didn't know was possible, thanks for that tip. I'll actually update the post to include this as well

Matthew Pardini • Oct 2 '20

Looks like I forgot my quotation marks around the color:red part. Check out facebook’s console sometime. It’s decked out (or at least it used to be, I don’t have fb anymore)