Everyone in the Salesforce ecosystem knows how to open the Developer Console. Most of us just use it the same way we did in 2018: open a tab, run a query, check a debug log, close it. But the Console has picked up genuinely useful features over the years, and ignoring them is costing you time.
Here are six that are worth learning.
1. Perspectives: reset your workspace in one click
Console perspectives are saved layouts — which panels are open, where they sit, how much space each gets. Most developers never touch them and end up dragging panels around every session. Create one perspective for "querying" (Query Editor front and center, logs docked) and one for "debugging" (Logs, Stack Trace, and Checkpoints expanded). Switching takes a second and removes constant rearranging.
2. Checkpoints: breakpoints that remember
Checkpoints are the Console's most underrated feature. Set a checkpoint on a line, run your code, and the Console captures heap and variable state at that exact point — no re-running with extra debug statements. When you're chasing a null-pointer deep in a trigger handler, a checkpoint beats System.debug() spaghetti every time. (If your org's test strategy is the reason debugging hurts, our test classes guide covers coverage rules and gotchas worth fixing first.)
3. Execute Anonymous with debug log levels that stick
Everyone runs anonymous Apex. Fewer people set the log levels first. Running everything at FINEST gives you a wall of noise; running with default levels gives you nothing. Set a repeatable combination — e.g. Apex Code at DEBUG, Visualforce at INFO, everything else lower — and save it as your default. You'll read logs in seconds instead of minutes.
4. The Query Editor's multi-line and history tricks
The Query Editor keeps a history of the queries you ran this session, and it accepts multi-line SOQL if you stop fighting the single-line habit. Build the query across lines, keep the history open, and re-running a slightly tweaked query takes five seconds. Combine this with the perspective from point 1 and ad-hoc data investigation gets dramatically faster.
5. View the log as a tree, not a wall of text
The raw debug log is unreadable at scale. Switch to the tree view (the stack-tree icon) and expand only the execution units you care about. Combined with log filters on specific classes, you can trace a single trigger's execution inside a 50,000-line log without scrolling once.
6. "Open Raw Log" for export and diffing
When a bug only reproduces in production and you need to compare a working log against a broken one, the Console lets you open and download the raw log. Save both, diff them in your editor of choice, and the divergence point usually jumps out. It's faster than re-reading two logs in the browser.
One more thing: the Console is a scratchpad, not an IDE
For real development work, VS Code with the Salesforce extensions is still the right home — our Apex PDF walkthrough was built there, and the extension-based workflow wins on everything from source tracking to deployments. Think of the Console as your always-available scratchpad: perfect for quick queries, one-off scripts, and fast debugging, without the setup cost.
Master the six features above and the scratchpad becomes genuinely fast.
Originally published at Way2Force.
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