It's easy enough in Chrome Developer Tools to inspect an element and edit an existing CSS rule applying to that element but what if you want to create a whole new style rule?
In my case what I wanted to do was apply the following style rules:
br {display: none}
hr {margin-top: 20px}
font {font-size: 18px}
To the Principles behind the Agile Manifesto so that I could print it out on one A4 sheet of paper directly from the browser.
The official document on Chrome Developer Tools that I've already linked to does have a section on Adding New Rules and Properties but it's out of date and doesn't work like that in the latest version of Chrome.
There is now a dedicated button in the Styles pane for "New Style Rule". It looks like a plus (+):
This will create a new style block which will allow you to define the selector yourself:
This is handy for little amendments on the fly, however it doesn't work well for CSS3 media queries that need extra curly brackets, or for pasting whole sections of CSS in to test.
The solution to that is to first click on the + button to add a new style, then hit enter (or click in the adjacent whitespace).
This will now show a link to the inspector stylesheet called inspector-stylesheet:1
If you click that link, it opens a whole live stylesheet that you can write complex rules in, as well as paste a whole external stylesheet into for testing.
Try using CSS Brush, a chrome plugin to create CSS live. You can create selectors from the page. You can have the complete CSS path or filter it up to make a shorter one. The context-sensitive menu is quite helpful while editing CSS properties live. You can even switch on/off properties or selectors.
Related
Please note: I found this question as well as this one, but both of their answers involve writing and executing customized JS. My question here is about how to wield Chrome Dev Tools (or similar) to accomplish the same thing in real-time.
I have a quasi-legacy JVM app that serves (and creates as part of its build pipeline) all sorts of nasty and messy CSS files.
I'm wondering if Chrome Dev Tools (or any other modern OSS webdev tool for that matter) has a "reverse engineering" feature in it that allows you to click on an HTML element and get a list of all the CSS rules that apply to it. And, not only that, but which rules are overriding other rules.
This way, when I need to tweak my CSS, it's less of a wild goose chase to figure out which rules are coming from which CSS files and that are actually being applied to the live element at runtime.
Any ideas?
Yes, in Chrome DevTools (F12 in Windows / Option+Cmd+I in OSX) within the Elements panel you can click on an element and see the applied CSS rules on the right-hand side. The overridden styles or classes are crossed out, and you can see the file name in which the CSS rule comes from. See below:
element.style refers to inline styles. For example, if I modified the selected element to be <div class="container" style="background-color:#000">...</div>, background-color:#000 will show up in the that section.
#content refers to the div element with the associated id of 'content'. The checkboxes that are checked on the right indicate that they have been applied with no overriding. You can check and uncheck these to play around with the styles so that you can see what you should change in your source code.
The html, body, div, span etc. allows multiple selectors to use the same styles. All the selectors in that comma-separated list will have the styles, except some may be overridden by other CSS rules - in this case, margin and padding are overridden by the more specific #content selector.
The next block is for user agent styles. These are styles that are applied by the browser, and each browser may apply different ones. This can be a problem if you have more specific rules defined yourself. Many people use normalizers to make sure things remain consistent among browsers. Check out Normalize
The inherited section shows all the styles that are inherited from parent styles. In this example, the text-align: left style was applied from the .container class as that is the parent element and the #content element didn't override it explicitly.
Update
Added better quality screenshot (thanks to #SLaks)
Added keyboard shortcuts for access (thanks to #NKD)
Added simple explanations of the sections of the Styles panel on the right.
Modern browsers have an "inspector" option that allow you to select a piece of generated HTML and view the CSS applied to it. Each one varies slightly, but normally hitting F12 will get you going.
Is there a way (preferably in Chrome Developer Tools) to see all CSS styles that apply to a certain element?
The Styles tab in Chrome Devtools only shows rules whose media queries currently match.
You can simply click on element tab and then on you stylesheet document link, it will take you to the Source tab where you can easily edit you stylesheet and can see you styles already given in the stylesheet.
I think you mean the "Compute" tab next to it.
https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/elements-styles
I am frustrated. I have one website where my drop-down CSS menu works and another where it doesn't.
Their stylesheets differ wildly and, although I have tried to manually copy the menu styles from one to the other, but with no success.
Is their any tool which will let me (like FireDebug) click on a page section (the menu) and then copy the rules which affect that section - ignoring those which are hidden by other rules - so that I can post them into the second site's stylesheet.
It seems that rather than having multiple styles affecting the menu and trying to sort out which have precedence, I'd like to have some software sort it out and generate a single combined rule ... if you see what I mean.
Both FireBug and the inbuilt Chrome Dev Tools show you what styles are being utilised by the selected element. I don't work with FireBug much, but I know the Chrome Dev Tools will cross out overrided styles and even show default user-stylesheets where applicable. It's also kind of nifty when inline styles are applied, eg for a table the "frame" attribute, as it converts these to CSS and displays it as part of the styling ;)
Sounds like you've got problems with accidental inheritance. Try to make sure your CSS selectors are only referencing the elements you want to style. Otherwise things get messy, and stuff like this happens.
Is there a firefox addon or is there a way to use firebug such that you can select some text on the website and it will tell you what styles are being used for that bit of text?
At the moment if I select a bit of text that is styled using css imported from elsewhere I would have to go digging manually to find out what style is being used. Is there an easier way?
Both FireBug and Web Developer addons can be used for this.
Just right click it in Firebug, choose HTML, and in the right pane, select Style>Show User Agent CSS. This will show a list of CSS rules that are being applied on the selected element.
I use the Web Developer Toolbar in FireFox to test CSS-edits. I want to do the same in IE, and I can somewhat do that with IE8's Developer Tool.
However I can't add a style in Developer Tools, only edit existing styles - does any of you guys know of a way to edit the CSS like you can do with Chris Pedericks Web Developer Toolbar?
You can:
add a style attribute (right click the html tag and click add attribute (with the name style, and then edit the style attribute once its added)
Click the CSS tab, right click the empty space, and add a rule (this is like adding a line to your css file)
Adding to what Gabriel mentioned above.
For a quick addition to test and see the effect I do it a bit differently.
With the HTML tab selected choose the "Attributes" panel next to Style, Trace Styes and Layout.
Click the "+" button and begin typing the css style you would like to add. The new style attribute is added automatically in the DOM view panel.
Hope this helps.
I'm on my Mac right now, but I remember running into that.
When looking at the right side of the Developer Tool, you see a list of CSS styles. Above that you see a few 'tabs': Style, Trace Styles, Layout, Attributes. If I remember correctly you can't change them in the style tab. But you can change them in one of the other tabs. You might have to edit them through the style attribute.
You could try firebug lite but it's a little work to get it setup.
Follow following steps:
1. Click on Developers Tool
2. In Html select element for which you want to add css
3. Select attribute tab present on right side
4. Add Name and Value.
Check your style is applied to html element.