Recently, I was wanting to try out some of the functions in Lodash to see how they worked. I went to Repl.it at first because that’s been my go-to sandbox to play around in. But Repl.it, as nice as it is, is a little too big for a quick script to play around in.

But that’s when I found RunJS - A playground for JavaScript and TypeScript. This little application (for Windows, Mac, and Linux) lets you run a full Node environment with NPM support in a small, clean application. It’s the reason why Why does changing my copy change the original! has a YouTube video with it. This app makes is really easy to install a library, run some code through it and see how it works and has been great for presentations using just JavaScript.

The next time you just want to play around with some JavaScript, forget the browser console and just open up RunJS.