If you want to use chrome devtools without changing your version of node, I'd recommend this implementation of node + devtool that uses electron (https://github.com/Jam3/devtool).
It literally changed my life. Thanks whoever is responsible for this project.
Yes, this app launches a chrome devtools windows (as part of electron) and lets you inspect your code using the dev tools gui which I find much more productive than the text-based CLI debugger.
I believe the comparison was not with text-based debuggers, but with the more mainstream Node.js debugging options that also provide Blink or Chrome DevTools UIs:
1. Node Inspector (https://github.com/node-inspector/node-inspector), the most prevalent Node.js debugging tool, at least until Node v6.3.0. And which also happens to be mentioned by Jam3/devtool in the Comparisons section.
Thanks for pointing these out. I tried using the --inspect flag like your article pointed out but I couldn't get it to work with Chrome 54.
I can't really give a compare and contrast between what I'm using and the --inspect flag. From the article, I feel like I'd like --inspect better if I could get it to work.
It literally changed my life. Thanks whoever is responsible for this project.