Web UI guide

The web UI is the browser workspace for Lific. Use it for visual triage, Markdown editing, project navigation, and account administration; use the CLI, REST API, or MCP when you need scripts or agents.

Start with My Work

The home dashboard groups active issues by project and provides recently viewed items, pinned pages, an activity digest, and quick actions. Use it as the jump-off point for work that spans several projects.

The activity digest carries a rate indicator. It seeds from the last 24 hours of activity you can see, then counts realtime events as they arrive, and it reports the shortest window that has enough events: updates per second, minute, hour, or day.

Navigate project work

Each project keeps its own navigation state. Issue tabs are All, Recent, Open, and Closed; page tabs are Browse, Recent, Drafts, and Archived; plan tabs are Active, Done, Archived, and All; and module tabs are Active, Backlog, Archive, and All. Count badges show the current totals, and the selected tab persists per project and resource area.

The sidebar shows recent items for the active section and deliberately excludes transient search results and items from unrelated sections. Its width is resizable and persists in the browser. On desktop it can also be collapsed out of the way from the control beside the Lific wordmark, and the topbar then carries the control that brings it back.

Project ordering is personal: moving a project changes your sidebar without rearranging other users' projects. Project and group action menus include move-up and move-down commands. Desktop expansion controls are separate from destination links, so a link can open in another tab. On mobile, selecting a project opens its navigation pane; Back returns to the project list before dismissing the drawer.

Triage issues

Open a project's issue list to:

• switch between All, Recent, Open, and Closed sub-tabs;
• filter by status, priority, module, or label;
• search, sort, group, and choose list density;
• save a named view for your own filters, grouping, sorting, layout, swimlanes, and hidden statuses; and
• switch between list and board layouts.

Board views support status or priority swimlanes, collapsible columns, and hidden columns. On small screens, the board snaps to a usable column at a time. Select an issue to open its peek panel without losing your place in the list.

Use row selection controls for bulk actions. The desktop sub-tab strip has a select-all control, and Ctrl/Cmd+A selects visible list rows while the list owns the shortcut. Clicking a title or identifier opens the issue; clicking elsewhere on a row does not navigate. Export selected issues as one Markdown file, including canonical metadata and comments, up to 16 MiB. A failed export reports an error rather than saving a partial file.

Edit an issue

The issue editor supports Markdown preview, a formatting toolbar, issue-reference autocomplete, Mermaid diagrams, code-block copy, labels, modules, dates, relations, comments, and attachments. Use the keyboard shortcut help or command palette when you do not remember a shortcut.

The status chip in the issue topbar is a picker, not a badge: select it to change status without opening the sidebar field.

Linked issue chips show their current status and refresh as it changes. Duplicate relations display both Duplicate of and Duplicated by links.

Changes can be undone from the UI. Deletes use a deferred undo window, so confirm the item and use Undo immediately if the deletion was accidental.

Discuss in comments

Comments on issues and pages are threaded in one list. Your own comments carry an actions menu with Edit and Delete; the menu appears only on comments you wrote. Editing opens the comment in place with the same composer, and an edited comment is marked edited, with the exact time in the label's tooltip.

Each comment has a stable anchor link next to its author, so you can point someone at one comment rather than the whole thread. In Markdown, #42 becomes a link to comment 42 on the current issue or page, and LIF-25#comment-42 links to a comment on another issue. Both are skipped inside code spans and code blocks.

A long thread opens on up to 50 of its most recent comments, in reading order, with a "Load older comments" control above them. A response-byte budget can make a page shorter. The comment count next to the heading shows a trailing + while older comments are still unloaded, so it never reads as a total it is not.

Opening a link to a comment further back loads the pages between automatically and scrolls to it. The automatic search covers up to 250 older comments. Past that it stops, so a link to a comment that was deleted, or one buried thousands of comments deep, cannot walk an entire thread on its own; use "Load older comments" to keep going by hand.

Work with pages and plans

Pages can be project-scoped or workspace-scoped. Browse, Recent, Drafts, and Archived page sub-tabs provide stable homes for each lifecycle state. Move project pages into folders with drag-and-drop on desktop or the Move-to-folder picker on touch devices; a page and its folder must belong to the same project.

Plans organize nested steps. Link a step to an issue when the step should follow that issue's lifecycle. Plan lists provide Active, Done, Archived, and All sub-tabs. Comments and activity are available on issues and pages, while plan activity records plan and step changes.

Labels and modules are managed from the project structure controls. Labels are project-scoped and can be attached to issues and pages; workspace pages do not use project labels.

Navigate and personalize

The command palette searches actions and content and highlights matching result text. Deep links let you share or bookmark an issue, page, or plan directly.

For a project already loaded in the browser, the palette searches its local issue and page index first. Sparse results trigger server full-text search, whose matches appear below the local results. Context menus and other overlays take ownership of their shortcuts while open.

Identifiers can be copied wherever you meet them: a copy control sits in the breadcrumb trail, on board cards, and in the issue peek panel, and list rows offer the same action in their context menu. The controls are ordinary buttons, so they are reachable by keyboard, and they flip to a check mark once the identifier is on the clipboard.

Appearance settings include accent color, density, font scale, and reduced motion. Choose Light, Dark or System in Settings or the navigation theme menu. Theme controls share the current preference and follow changes from another tab. Profile edits update the navigation account display without a reload. Keyboard shortcuts are listed in the shortcut help panel.

Transfer or publish a project

A project lead or instance admin can download a complete archive from the project overview. An instance admin imports it through New project. This transfers history and linked files into a new private project, rather than producing the human-readable Markdown export. See project archives for limits and reference reports.

The overview's Public view panel lets a lead or instance admin publish the project's current issues, pages, comments and linked files. Anonymous readers get the usual browsing views without editing controls. Existing content becomes public too, so review it before confirming publication. Public projects explains what is included and how to unpublish.

Accounts and administration

From account settings, manage your profile, password, active sessions, and connected tools. Instance settings control signups, browser auto-login, authorization enforcement, and login messaging. Project settings manage members and their viewer, maintainer, or lead roles; the last lead cannot be removed or demoted.

Changing your password revokes more than your sessions

Both destructive actions in account settings are full account recoveries. They revoke every session, API key, OAuth session, and connected tool belonging to your account and to the tools it owns:

• Change password signs you out on every other device and leaves you signed in here on a fresh session. The page states this next to the button, and re-reads your connected tools afterwards so they show as disconnected.
• Sign out everywhere and revoke access does the same and mints no replacement, so it signs out this browser too. It asks for confirmation inline before running, and stays put if the request fails, so a network error does not sign you out of a session that is still valid.

Reconnect each tool afterwards from the Connected tools section, or with lific connect, and replace any API key a script depends on. Restart a running MCP client after reconnecting it; it will not pick up a new credential on its own.

Some actions ask you to confirm your password

Connecting a tool, creating an account, granting instance admin, restoring a deactivated account, changing instance settings, adding a project member, and raising a member's project role all leave lasting access behind, so the server requires a sign-in from the last 15 minutes. A tab left open for longer than that is asked to confirm: the connect dialog, the Members roster and a project's member list each grow a single password field that names the waiting action, the action resumes with its inputs intact once you confirm, and a wrong password leaves everything where it was. On an instance with web_auto_login there is usually no password to confirm, since the session refreshes silently; if that is refused, the password prompt appears instead. Either way the refresh only ever produces a session for the account already signed in, never for the instance's first admin.

Signing out of a device, demoting an admin, deactivating an account, lowering a project role, removing a project member, and refusing a device connection request never ask. They only take access away, which is what you want to be fast while dealing with a compromise.

Use the connected-tools and API-key controls to review which agents can access the instance. Prefer user-owned bot identities for agents that should follow project membership. See self-hosting and the REST authorization notes for operator-level access rules.

Connected Tools provides templates for OpenCode, Cursor, Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Pi, VS Code, and Zed. Add custom or named connection supports other HTTP MCP clients and separate identities for multiple agents or machines. Give each connection its own ID, such as codex-laptop; disconnecting it leaves your other connections intact. The CLI connect flow also supports Gemini CLI, Windsurf, Goose, and Crush, with detection and per-client file writes.

Mobile and realtime behavior

Lific includes a PWA manifest and icons, so supported browsers can add the site to a phone or desktop home screen and open it in a standalone window. Installation does not provide offline editing or replica synchronization; the app still connects to the Lific server for data.

Loaded project lists use a shared browser read model kept current by realtime events. Tabs can share one WebSocket through Web Locks, and reconnecting clients resume by sequence cursor or backfill missed changes. Other views refresh their affected state when needed. After a reconnect or resync, wait for the view to catch up before continuing an edit.