How to add a right-click menu in Electron that has "Inspect Element" option like Chrome?

Question

I'm building an Electron application and I would like to inspect specific UI elements. I have the Chrome dev tools open for development, but what I want is to be able to right-click a UI element and choose "Inspect Element" like I can in Google Chrome. Currently, right-clicking doesn't do anything in my boilerplate Electron app. How can I enable this?

Answer 1

Electron has a built-in function called win.inspectElement(x, y).

Including this function as an option in a right-click context menu is possible by creating an Electron Menu with a MenuItem. Call the following in the client (aka renderer process) Javascript:

// Importing this adds a right-click menu with 'Inspect Element' option
const remote = require('remote')
const Menu = remote.require('menu')
const MenuItem = remote.require('menu-item')

let rightClickPosition = null

const menu = new Menu()
const menuItem = new MenuItem({
  label: 'Inspect Element',
  click: () => {
    remote.getCurrentWindow().inspectElement(rightClickPosition.x, rightClickPosition.y)
  }
})
menu.append(menuItem)

window.addEventListener('contextmenu', (e) => {
  e.preventDefault()
  rightClickPosition = {x: e.x, y: e.y}
  menu.popup(remote.getCurrentWindow())
}, false)