The Tell Context inspector is a live explorer view, showing the current elements and properties of the application or object targeted at the point where you are working in your script (the current tell context).

The Tell Context inspector drills down along with your script into successively deeper levels of tell context. For example, consider this script:

    tell application "BBEdit"
        tell document 1
            get word 1
        end tell
    end tell

If you select “document” in that script (in the second line), the Tell Context inspector shows the elements and properties of BBEdit (the application object). If you select “word” (in the third line), the Tell Context inspector shows the elements and properties of document 1 of application "BBEdit".

If you open the Tell Context inspector and it is empty or disabled or otherwise looks wrong, try switching explicitly to the window that you want inspected, and if necessary, compile it. This should wake up the Tell Context inspector and get it in synch with your activities in the script window.

The Tell Context inspector has the same basic functionalities as a dictionary explorer, but some of them are accessed a little differently because this is a floating palette (menus in the menu bar don’t apply to it, and keystrokes don’t target it):

• To insert a reference to an attribute into the frontmost script, click the Paste button. You can also drag from the inspector into your script.

• To open the dictionary for the currently targeted application (its name appears at the top of the inspector), click the Dictionary button.

• To reload the data for the currently selected line, click the Reload button. Hold down the Option key to reload all the data in the inspector.

• To edit the value of a property, choose Edit Value from the contextual menu.

• To generate a separate viewer window for a value, choose Open Viewer from the contextual menu.

Other explorer functionality works normally.