eyes

eyes

a customizable value inspector for Node.js

synopsis

I was tired of looking at cluttered output in the console -- something needed to be done, sys.inspect() didn't display regexps correctly, and was too verbose, and I had an hour or two to spare. So I decided to have some fun. eyes were born.

example of the output of a user-customized eyes.js inspector

eyes also deals with circular objects in an intelligent way, and can pretty-print object literals.

usage

var inspect = require('eyes').inspector({styles: {all: 'magenta'}});

inspect(something); // inspect with the settings passed to `inspector`

or

var eyes = require('eyes');

eyes.inspect(something); // inspect with the default settings

you can pass a label to inspect(), to keep track of your inspections:

eyes.inspect(something, "a random value");

If you want to return the output of eyes without printing it, you can set it up this way:

var inspect = require('eyes').inspector({ stream: null });

sys.puts(inspect({ something: 42 }));

customization

These are the default styles and settings used by eyes.

styles: {                 // Styles applied to stdout
    all:     'cyan',      // Overall style applied to everything
    label:   'underline', // Inspection labels, like 'array' in `array: [1, 2, 3]`
    other:   'inverted',  // Objects which don't have a literal representation, such as functions
    key:     'bold',      // The keys in object literals, like 'a' in `{a: 1}`
    special: 'grey',      // null, undefined...
    string:  'green',
    number:  'magenta',
    bool:    'blue',      // true false
    regexp:  'green',     // /\d+/
},

pretty: true,             // Indent object literals
hideFunctions: false,     // Don't output functions at all
stream: process.stdout,   // Stream to write to, or null
maxLength: 2048           // Truncate output if longer

You can overwrite them with your own, by passing a similar object to inspector() or inspect().

var inspect = require('eyes').inspector({
    styles: {
        all: 'magenta',
        special: 'bold'
    },
    maxLength: 512
});

Similar packages

Other packages similar to eyes

util

The 'util' module is a built-in Node.js module that provides various utilities, including the 'util.inspect' function, which can be used to inspect objects. While 'util.inspect' is more basic and lacks the colorful output of 'eyes', it is a standard part of Node.js and does not require an additional package.

prettyjson

The 'prettyjson' package is another tool for formatting JSON and JavaScript objects in a human-readable way. It provides colorful output similar to 'eyes', but focuses more on JSON data. It is a good alternative if you are primarily working with JSON.

cli-color

The 'cli-color' package provides a way to add color to console output in Node.js. While it does not specifically format objects, it can be used in conjunction with other tools to create colorful console outputs, similar to what 'eyes' offers.