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name: hd-webview description: > WEBVIEW — what the word "webview" means in Hydrogen Desktop and exactly how to open one. When the user says "show me in webview", "open it in webview", "in a webview", "webview panel", "wv", or asks to show ANY app/page/tool "in webview", it ALWAYS means a native Hydrogen workspace webview tab opened via adom-cli hydrogen webview open-or-refresh — NEVER VS Code's built-in Simple Browser, never an editor-internal browser, never an iframe hack. Read this the moment the word webview (or wv) appears. Trigger words — webview, wv, show me in webview, open in webview, in a webview, webview tab, webview panel, native webview, show in webview, launch in webview, webview app.

hd-webview — "webview" means a native Hydrogen webview tab. Period.

When a user (or a setup prompt) says "show me X in webview", they mean a native Hydrogen Desktop webview tab — a first-class panel in the HD workspace, next to their editor. Nothing else qualifies.

⛔ NEVER (the 2026-07-16 incident — do not repeat)

  • NEVER open VS Code's built-in "Simple Browser" (or any editor-internal browser page) to satisfy a webview request. A setup-thread AI did this once — the user called it "an awful outcome that can never happen again." The Simple Browser is not the HD webview: it's cramped, it isn't a workspace tab, and it breaks every downstream flow (screenshots, captions, panel routing).
  • Don't fall back silently to pup or a native browser either — those are different, deliberate destinations (see hd-open-url for the decision guide). "webview" is not ambiguous; it names exactly one thing.

✅ The exact command (idempotent — safe to re-run)

# open (or refresh, if a tab with this name already exists) a webview tab:
adom-cli hydrogen webview open-or-refresh --name "<Tab Name>" --url "<url>" --panel-id <id>

# ⚠️ --panel-id is REQUIRED to CREATE a new tab (without it: "Tab 'X' not found
#    and --panel-id not provided"). Get a panel id first:
adom-cli hydrogen workspace get        # or: adom-cli hydrogen workspace tabs
# Re-running with the same --name once the tab exists just navigates/refreshes
# (no --panel-id needed). The --name is your stable handle.

Local Adom apps (parts search, chip-fetcher, adom-tsci previews, wiki pages) are all shown this way: start/locate the app's local URL, then open-or-refresh it into a named tab.

Verify you actually did it

The tab must appear in adom-cli hydrogen workspace tabs with your --name. If it isn't there, you did NOT open a webview — go again.

For the broader "which surface should this URL open in?" decision (webview vs pup vs native browser vs headless fetch), see hd-open-url.

hdbw — HD's standalone browser window (the fourth surface)

Under Hydrogen Desktop there is one more surface: hdbw, HD's standalone built-in Tauri browser window (picker label "HD Browser Window", destination id webview-window, window label hd-browse-*). It is a separate OS window HD manages directly — bigger than a pane tab, still not a real browser. Open one first-class via POST /hdbw/open {"url": ...} on HD's control API (0.1.113+), or pick "HD Browser Window" in the Browser Picker. The surface shortlist: wv (this skill's webview panel; HD's pane tab inside HD), pup, the user's native browser, hdbw. VS Code's Simple Browser is NEVER one of them.