The web viewer is always served by a session. It shows the same repositories, project tabs, terminal panes, and session accent as the TUI, at the URL printed when the daemon starts. The browser is another client of the session, not a separate copy.
The header's project control opens an existing server-side directory, closes a project, or reorders tabs. The same picker can clone a remote repository into the selected directory. Cloning runs git on the server and uses that machine's SSH agent or credential helper.
Only https://, http://, ssh://, git+ssh://, and scp-style user@host:path remotes are accepted. Local paths, file://, git://, and ext:: are refused. One clone runs at a time; it continues on the server if the page is closed or reloaded, and the page can resume polling it. A destination with an existing name is rejected.
Each project exposes status, log, and tree views, a diff/file content pane, and the same interactive terminal session as an attached TUI. The Views and Keyboard and mouse guides describe the shared Git and input behavior. The viewer binds the same commands to keys a browser can actually receive rather than to the TUI's physical keys; Keyboard and mouse → Web viewer records which commands the browser keeps unchanged, reinterprets, or leaves unbound, and the in-app shortcut sheet lists them with their keys and marks the ones unavailable on the current screen. On wider screens a one-line hint bar under the footer prints the leader and its follow-up keys the way the TUI does. Browser view state (last tab/file, tree expansion, and maximized panel) is stored separately from TUI view state.
Markdown files render as formatted documents with highlighted fenced code. .html and .htm files can render in a sandbox that allows inline scripts but blocks cookies, session access, network connections, and external assets; use the raw-source toggle for inspection. The rendered page is a preview of a self-contained file, not a general website.
Drag the sidebar and upper-panel dividers to resize them; double-click a divider to reset it. The upper-panel split is stored in ~/.nightcrow/viewer.json and shared with other browser clients — a percentage means the same thing at any width. The sidebar width is not: it is a pixel count, so the browser keeps it to itself and each screen has its own. Both are independent of the TUI's [layout] values. The header swatch cycles the session accent and is shared with attached TUIs.
From md width up, the project tabs run across the header or down the page's left edge; the header button just right of the accent swatch moves them, and the TUI's [layout] tabs = "left" is the same idea for a terminal. On the left the nightcrow title heads the column and the tabs hang under it, one project per row, with the same labels, drag-to-reorder and close control as the row. Like the pane view mode, the choice is this browser's own — a screen with rows to spare is not the screen with columns to spare — and it is stored in the browser, not in viewer.json. Below md there is no strip either way; the header's project menu takes its place.
The terminal toolbar can add a pane, show panes as a grid or tabs, maximize the terminal panel, claim sizing for this screen, and show the on-screen key bar. A project has up to 8 panes. Pane order and zoom are shared while the session runs; they are not restored after the session ends. A PTY has one size, so the client that most recently claims sizing determines the grid rendered by every client.
On phones and other narrow layouts, the bottom navigation switches among Repo, Content, and Terminal. Touch-dragging a terminal scrolls it; the key bar supplies Escape, Tab, arrows, and control keys when a soft keyboard cannot. A soft keyboard opening does not resize the panes: the PTY keeps its grid and the pane shows the bottom of it, so a full-screen program is not made to repaint from the top every time the keyboard comes and goes. Layout changes made while the keyboard is up are applied once it closes. Its Ctrl button is a latch for the next typed character. The keyboard-bar preference is stored in the browser, so it can be changed from the terminal toolbar. The shortcut leader key is stored in the browser too, and can be rebound or switched off from the shortcut sheet.
Terminal programs may write to the clipboard through OSC 52; the text reaches the browser device viewing the pane. A program requesting clipboard contents is not answered. If the browser requires a user gesture to write, the viewer shows a Copy action.
Configure the listener and credential in [web_viewer]. The default is 127.0.0.1:8091 over plain HTTP. An authenticated viewer grants repository browsing and interactive shell access. For remote use, do not expose the port directly: tunnel it with SSH or put it behind a TLS reverse proxy.
If no password or hashed_password is configured, the daemon generates a random password, saves it to ~/.nightcrow/config.toml, and prints it once at startup. hashed_password accepts an Argon2 PHC string and takes precedence over password. Login attempts are rate-limited and issue an HTTP-only, SameSite cookie; logout revokes the server-side token. Tokens are persisted in ~/.nightcrow/sessions and use the configured session_ttl_hours (24 by default, 0 for no server-side expiry). See Configuration for limits and reload behavior.
The viewer checks the request host and origin before serving repository data. Repository/path errors are redacted where exposing server paths would be unsafe; clone failures may include actionable Git output. The HTML preview is sandboxed and cannot use the viewer's session or connect back to it.
The React/Vite source is in viewer-ui/; the committed viewer-ui/dist/ bundle is embedded in release builds. Install Node.js 26 dependencies with npm --prefix viewer-ui ci, run npm --prefix viewer-ui run dev for a local frontend, and use the verification commands in Getting started → Building and testing.