Today I was debugging a confusing situation.

1. The variable inside a catch statement in TypeScript is any by default, which is awful
2. Safari was throwing undefined when trying to place a webm file into a <video> element, which was breaking my brain 🤯

I had mistakenly done this, assuming e would be an Error:

try {
  putIntoVideoTag(file)
} catch (e) {
  logger.error('What‽’, e.name, e.message)
}

So when e was undefined, it exploded.

One can manually type the catch variable so the compiler won’t let you accidentally call e.name, like:

try {
  putIntoVideoTag(file)
} catch (e: unknown) {
  logger.error('What‽’, e)
}

But that means I can (and will) forget to do it.

Well, TIL that TypeScript now supports a flag to make all catch variables default to unknown which is great: useUnknownInCatchVariables

It was added in the 4.4 release.

This is now the default in all my TypeScript projects ✨