Claude Viewer

A small WinForms / DevExpress companion for Claude Code. It watches a folder for HTML and Markdown artifacts and renders them in tabbed WebView2 panes — so the CLI writes files, the viewer shows them, and the two stay in sync.

What it does

• Watch a folder (C:\Projects\.artifacts by default) and list every .html / .md file there in a DevExpress grid, newest at the top.
• Render on click — HTML loads via WebView2.Navigate(file://…), Markdown is run through Markdig with a broadsheet CSS theme so MD output looks like a real document, not a code dump.
• Live-reload — overwrite a file Claude Code wrote earlier and the open tab refreshes automatically. Reads tolerate locked files mid-write.
• Title sniffing — pulls <title> from HTML and the first # heading from Markdown to populate the grid's Title column.
• Folder picker — Change… button on the artifact panel; choice is persisted to %LOCALAPPDATA%\ClaudeViewer\settings.json.

Requirements

• Windows 10 / 11
• .NET 10 SDK (net10.0-windows)
• DevExpress WinForms (using DevExpress.Win 25.2.5 — adjust to whatever is licensed on the machine)
• WebView2 Runtime (shipped with Windows 11)

Run

dotnet build
dotnet run --project ClaudeViewer

Or open ClaudeViewer.sln in Visual Studio.

Configuration

Setting	Where	Notes
Watched folder	Change… button OR %LOCALAPPDATA%\ClaudeViewer\settings.json	Persists across runs.
Override (CI / launchers)	CLAUDE_VIEWER_DIR env var	Wins over the settings file; the picker is disabled while this is set.

Project layout

ClaudeViewer/
├── Program.cs             entry point + skin
├── MainForm.cs            DockManager (left) + DocumentManager (tabs)
├── Models/Artifact.cs     file metadata
├── Services/
│   ├── ArtifactWatcher.cs FileSystemWatcher → BindingList<Artifact>
│   ├── MarkdownRenderer.cs Markdig + broadsheet CSS
│   └── Settings.cs        JSON persistence
└── Controls/ArtifactForm.cs  XtraForm hosting WebView2 (one per tab)

Workflow with Claude Code

Tell Claude Code (in CLAUDE.md or per request) to write generated HTML / Markdown artifacts under your watched folder, e.g. C:\Projects\.artifacts\. Anything it writes appears at the top of the grid and renders on click.