Harry Brundage, a co-worker of mine at Shopify, does a lot of CoffeeScript development and said he would love to be able to do CoffeeScript right from the console in Chrome’s Web Inspector. I asked Paul Irish, a “dev relations guy” at Google, to point me in the right direction on building just such a thing.

The result of today’s pet project is CoffeeConsole, a Chrome extension that adds a new panel inside the Web Inspector. Type in any CoffeeScript and then hit the run button (or hit Command-Enter or Shift-Enter). The code will be compiled into JavaScript and then run in the context of the current window.

I’ve put together a quick video to demonstrate this.

Behind the scenes, I hobbled together a bunch of resources. Namely, the Ace editor and the CoffeeScript compiler There really wasn’t a lot of code that I needed to add except to figure out how to run the compiled JavaScript in the proper context.

There’s definitely more features that can (and maybe should) be added such as the ability to review the compiled JavaScript and the ability to view the compilation errors. The project has been added to GitHub, so feel free to contribute. (As of writing this, I still need to choose a license but likely an MIT license.)

Download the extension or check out the repo on Github.