

I would much prefer to launch using Alfred, Spotlight, or a dock shortcut and just always have remote debugging enabled.

If you are developing on a daily basis, this is obnoxious. The solution presented in the Chrome Debugger extension docs is “just launch it from the command line”. On a Mac however this is a little more …obtuse. If you’re developing in a Windows environment, adding this flag is as simple as modifying your Chrome shortcut and adding it.

Luckily, Chrome Debugger supports the ability to attach to an existing Chrome instance! Simply launch Chrome with the -remote-debugging-port=9222 flag and you’re good to go. When building a React application, some extensions like React Developer Tools and Redux DevTools are critical tools for building and it just isn’t practical to install these every time you start debug mode. Unfortunately this new Chrome instance is an ad-hoc launch under an ephemeral user profile, which means no extensions. That’s it! When you start Chrome Debugger from VSCode it will launch a new instance of Chrome with debugging mode enabled and you can use that for your application preview and debugging workspace.
