Yesterday, I ran across the original eyes.js library for Node.js, which provides improved functionality to replace util.inspect(). It seemed nice and did a good job color-coding the output, but it was missing a few features that I wanted, such as the ability to hide certain types (such as null or undefined properties), as well as the ability to specify stacked color attributes on the output. Initially, I opted to modify the original source project, but as it went on I realized I didn't really like the way it was structured and decided to rewrite the entire module, using colors and underscore to simplify the implementation.

Therefore, I forked the repository and rewrote the entire core library file. My branch is available at https://github.com/gmalysa/spyglass. It is also available to be installed through npm:

npm install spyglass

The README on github has a very in-depth explanation of how to use spyglass, so I won't repeat all of it here, but the basic idea is that it allows for colored, pretty-printed object inspection, optionally writing the output to a stream (such as the console) or simply saving it as a string. It has a built-in type identification system (which allows for better resolution than the typeof operator) with user-customizable hooks that allow for special display routines to be provided for any user-defined class. Reasonable defaults are provided for all of the built in Javascript classes; more might come for some built in Node.js objects as well. Object properties can be hidden from the output based on exact name matches, regular expressions, or value types (i.e. null properties, function properties, etc.) to avoid unnecessary clutter.

If you're currently using eyes.js or are just looking for a tool to add powerful inspection/var_dump()-like capabilities to your Node.js project, please give it a try and let me know about any bugs or changes that might be useful!