What tips and tricks do you have for debugging AppleScript? Is there a debugger? If not, what is the best way to insert "prints" to display the value of variables? Is there a way to "pretty print" more complicated data structures?
6 Answers
If you're building any amount of AppleScripts, ScriptDebugger is the best tool I can recommend. Having said that...
Xcode is a free option that can be used to develop AppleScripts and can step through code with the debugger. The ability is primarily included so you can build Cocoa applications with AppleScript Studio, but you could use it for any AppleScript development.
If you're looking for something simpler, you might check out Smile, which isn't really a debugger, but does offer features useful for debugging that aren't available in the standard Script Editor.
To get the names of windows and other GUI elements and properties, I've found UI Browser invaluable. You can use it to inspect whatever you want to control with AppleScript to find the designations of the elements you want to control
Not free, but easily worth it for a serious developer.
Use the log command. Example:
log "Hello world!"
The output can then be seen in the "Messages" windows in the official editor.
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