tldr-error 💥

Put your messy stack traces on a diet.

I built this because I got sick of missing a single comma and watching Node vomit 50 lines of node:internal garbage into my terminal. I just want to know what broke and exactly what line caused it.

tldr-error is a zero-config CLI wrapper. It intercepts your crashes, throws away the noise, and gives you a clean, readable summary of exactly what went wrong.

Before & After

Installation

You don't even need to install it to try it. Just use npx:

npx tldr-error node your-app.js

Or, if you want it permanently on your machine, install it globally:

npm install -g tldr-error

Usage

Typing tldr-error every time is annoying. You have two better options:

Option 1: The short alias

Install globally and use the built-in 2-letter alias te:

te node index.js
te tsx server.ts
te npm run dev

Option 2: Set it and forget it (Recommended)

Add it to your package.json scripts once — then just run npm run dev like you always do:

"scripts": {
  "dev": "tldr-error nodemon index.js",
  "start": "tldr-error node index.js"
}

Normal console.logs pass through perfectly. Warnings print normally. But if your app crashes, it swallows the ugly stack trace and prints a clean red box with your exact error summary and a clickable relative file path.

Why I Built This

I'm just a dev who hates scrolling up in the terminal. I built this to scratch my own itch and save my sanity during late-night debugging sessions.

If you find a bug or a weird edge-case error (like a super specific framework syntax error) that the regex doesn't catch, please open an issue or submit a PR! I'd love to see how other people improve the parsing logic.

Contributing

1. Fork the repo
2. Create a branch: git checkout -b fix/your-fix
3. Push and open a PR

License

MIT