Showing console in Observable Desktop

[dvdkouril]

Hi,

first of all: great work, I’m super hyped about Notebook Kit!

I was wondering, could it be a good idea for Observable Desktop to have an option to spawn a console window/panel?

Maybe I’m in a very specific use case but I currently:

• use the Observable Desktop app for the ease of manipulating the notebook cells, editing the code in them
• use the preview command and look at the same notebook in browser to see the console output

This stems from my workflow:

• I’m working on a js library code, serving it locally with vite
• import the library in an Observable notebook from localhost
• pretty fequently, I edit both the notebook to play around with the API (hence using the Desktop app) and the library code, and there it’s very usefull to see debug outputs in a console

Just an idea.

[mbostock]

You can use Shift-Command-I ⇧⌘I to open the console. This gives you full access to Safari’s devtools, including the debugger. You can also right-click and use Inspect Element. Does that address your needs?

It might be possible to add this a menu somewhere, too…

[dvdkouril]

Oh gosh, absolutely! I could have sworn I tried that…

[dvdkouril]

Actually, I see what happened: the shortcut works if you're focused in on a code cell. If click somewhere in a white space, the console doesn't pop up (at least for me):

Screen.Recording.2025-09-05.at.12.54.24.PM.mov

[mbostock]

In the Desktop editor, your code runs within a sandboxed iframe. So if you have notebook content focused, most keyboard shortcuts won’t work. You can use Escape to refocus the parent frame and then keyboard shortcuts will work again.