Note that these only work in the developer tools of certain browsers.
$_ gives you the value of whatever expression was evaluated last.
"foo" // "foo"
$_ // "foo"
$0 refers to the DOM element currently selected in the Inspector. So if <div id="foo"> is highlighted:
$0 // <div id="foo">
$0.getAttribute('id') // "foo"
$1 refers to the element previously selected, $2 to the one selected before that, and so forth for $3 and $4.
To get a collection of elements matching a CSS selector, use $$(selector). This is essentially a shortcut for document.querySelectorAll.
var images = $$('img'); // Returns an array or a nodelist of all matching elements
| $_ | $()¹ | $$() | $0 | $1 | $2 | $3 | $4 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Opera | 15+ | 11+ | 11+ | 11+ | 11+ | 15+ | 15+ | 15+ |
| Chrome | 22+ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Firefox | 39+ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | × | × | × | × |
| IE | 11 | 11 | 11 | 11 | 11 | 11 | 11 | 11 |
| Safari | 6.1+ | 4+ | 4+ | 4+ | 4+ | 4+ | 4+ | 4+ |
¹ alias to either document.getElementById or document.querySelector