This guide shows you how to discover CSS grids on a page, examine them, and debug layout issues in the Elements panel of Chrome DevTools.
The examples shown in the screenshots appearing in this article are from these two web pages: Fruit box and Snack box.
Discover CSS grids
When an HTML element on your page has display: grid or display: inline-grid applied to it, you
can see a grid badge next to it in the Elements panel.
Click the badge to toggle the display of a grid overlay on the page. The overlay appears over the element, laid out like a grid to show the position of its grid lines and tracks:
Open the Layout pane. When grids are included on a page, the Layout pane includes a Grid section containing a number of options for viewing those grids.
Align grid items and their content with the Grid Editor
You can align grid items and their content with a click of a button instead of typing CSS rules.
To align grid items and their content:
In the Elements > Styles pane, click the
Grid Editor button next to display: grid.
In the Grid Editor, click the corresponding buttons to set the
align-*andjustify-*CSS properties for the grid items and their content.
Observe the adjusted grid items and content in the viewport.
Grid viewing options
The Grid section in the Layout pane contains 2 sub sections:
- Overlay display settings
- Grid overlays
Let's look into each of these sub sections in detail.
Overlay display settings
The Overlay display settings consists of two parts:
a. A drop-down menu with the following options:
- Hide line labels: Hide the line labels for each grid overlay.
- Show line numbers: Show the line numbers for each grid overlay (selected by default).
- Show line names: Show the line names for each grid overlay in the case of grids with line names.
b. Checkboxes with options within:
- Show track sizes: Toggle to show or hide track sizes.
- Show area names: Toggle to show or hide area names, in the case of grids with named grid areas.
- Extend grid lines: By default, grid lines are only shown inside the element with
display: gridordisplay: inline-gridset on it; when toggling this option on, the grid lines extend to the edge of the viewport along each axis.
Let's examine these settings in more detail.
Show line numbers
By default, the positive and negative line numbers are displayed on the grid overlay.
Hide line labels
Select Hide line labels to hide the line numbers.
Show line names
You can select Show line names to view the line names instead of numbers. In this example, we have four lines with names: left, middle1, middle2 and right.
In this demo, the orange element spans from left to right, with CSS grid-column: left / right.
Showing line names makes it easier to visualize the start and end position of the element.
Show track sizes
Enable the Show track sizes checkbox to view the track sizes of the grid.
DevTools will display [authored size] - [computed size] in each line label: Authored size: The
size defined in the stylesheet (omitted if not defined). Computed size: The actual size on the screen.
In this demo, the snack-box column sizes are defined in the CSS grid-template-columns:1fr 2fr;.
Therefore, the column line labels show both authored and computed sizes: 1fr - 96.66px and
2fr - 193.32px.
The row line labels show only computed sizes: 80px and 80px since there are no row sizes defined in the stylesheet.
Show area names
To view the area names, enable the Show area names checkbox. In this example, there are three areas in the grid - top, bottom1 and bottom2.
Extend grid lines
Enable the Extend grid lines checkbox to extend the grid lines to the edge of the viewport along each axis.
Grid overlays
The Grid overlays section contains a list of grids that are present on the page, each with a checkbox, along with various options.
Enable overlay views of multiple grids
You can enable overlay views of multiple grids. In this example, there are two grid overlays enabled -
main and div.snack-box, each represented with different colors.
Customize the grid overlay color
You can customize each grid overlay color by clicking the color picker.
Highlight the grid
Click the highlight icon to immediately highlight the HTML element, scroll to it in the page and select it in the Elements panel.
