View and change CSS

Kayce Basques
Sofia Emelianova
Sofia Emelianova
GitHub

Complete these interactive tutorials to learn the basics of viewing and changing a page's CSS using Chrome DevTools.

View an element's CSS

  1. Right-click the Inspect me! text below and select Inspect. The Elements panel of DevTools opens.

    Inspect me!

  2. Observe the Inspect me! element highlighted blue in the DOM Tree.

    Highlighted element.

  3. In the DOM Tree, find the value of the data-message attribute for the Inspect me! element.

  4. Enter the attribute's value in the text box below.

  5. In the Elements > Styles tab, find the aloha class rule.

    The Styles tab lists the CSS rules being applied to whatever element is selected in the DOM Tree, which should still be the Inspect me! element.

  6. The aloha class is declaring a value for padding. Enter this value and its unit without spaces in the text box below.

If you'd like to dock your DevTools window to the right of your viewport, like on the screenshot in step one, see Change DevTools placement.

Add a CSS declaration to an element

Use the Styles tab when you want to change or add CSS declarations to an element.

  1. Right-click the Add a background color to me! text below and select Inspect.

    Add a background color to me!

  2. Click element.style near the top of the Styles tab.

  3. Type background-color and press Enter.

  4. Type honeydew and press Enter. In the DOM tree, you can see that an inline style declaration was applied to the element.

Adding a CSS declaration to the element via the Styles tab.

Add a CSS class to an element

Use the Styles tab to see how an element looks when a CSS class is applied to or removed from an element.

  1. Right-click the Add a class to me! element below and select Inspect.

    Add a class to me!

  2. Click .cls. DevTools reveals a text box where you can add classes to the selected element.

  3. Type color_me in the Add new class text box and then press Enter. A checkbox appears below the Add new class text box, where you can toggle the class on and off. If the Add a class to me! element had any other classes applied to it, you'd also be able to toggle them from here.

Applying the color_me class to the element.

Add a pseudostate to a class

Use the Styles tab to apply a CSS pseudostate to an element.

  1. Hover over the Hover over me! text below. The background color changes.

    Hover over me!

  2. Right-click the Hover over me! text and select Inspect.

  3. In the Styles tab, click :hov.

  4. Check the :hover checkbox. The background color changes like before, even though you're not actually hovering over the element.

Toggling the hover pseudostate on an element.

For more information, see Toggle a pseudo-class.

Change the dimensions of an element

Use the Box Model interactive diagram in the Styles tab to change the width, height, padding, margin, or border length of an element.

  1. Right-click the Change my margin! element below and select Inspect.

    Change my margin!

  2. To see the Box Model, click the Show sidebar. Show sidebar button in the action bar on the Styles tab. The Show sidebar button.

  3. In the Box Model diagram in the Styles tab, hover over padding. The element's padding is highlighted in the viewport. Element's padding.

  4. Double-click the left margin in the Box Model. The element currently doesn't have margins, so the margin-left has a value of -.

  5. Type 100 and press Enter. Changing the element's margin-left.

The Box Model defaults to pixels, but it also accepts other values, such as 25%, or 10vw.