As detailed in my previous blog post on Adding Support for Regular Expression Search in the Chromium Developer Console, some months ago I set out to make it possible to search for regular expressions in the Chromium/Google Chrome developer console. The task turned out to be more complicated than I anticipated however, and I was asked by the responsible developers to write a separate patch first to improve the console’s search result navigation.

Chromium/Google Chrome is my hands-down favourite browser for developing Web sites in, owing to its incredibly sleek developer tools. I feel right at home in its JavaScript console, for evaluating JavaScript interactively or to inspect logs from a running JavaScript application. However, the latter scenario is somewhat let down by the console’s limited search functionality. At the time of writing, the console only lets you search for plain text on a line-by-line basis. If I want to search for regular expressions, which I tend to do, maybe spanning multiple lines, I’ll have to paste the console contents into a text editor (Sublime, anyone?) and search in there.