[RFC] Improved Web UI Flow View
Author: mhilsCreated May 6, 2025Updated Sep 4, 2026
Labelskind/featurehelp wantedarea/webRFC
I've been thinking how we can improve the mitmweb flow view UX. In particular, I'd like to address the following points:
- Ability to view request + response at the same time. This is very useful for replay. This likely means we need add a vertical layout (as opposed to the current horizontal one). We can likely make this configurable without too much effort.
- Make interactive contentviews available in mitmweb.
- A bag of quality-of-life improvements, such as colored URL parts.
Here's a quick mockup with some of the ideas:
I'm not a UX designer, so critical feedback and additional suggestions are highly welcome! If you have suggestions for improving mitmweb, please comment below.
Potential Improvements
Small and self-contained (great for new contributors)
- Show reason phrase for HTTP/2 and /3. Not everyone knows status code by heart. Implementation-wise, write a script in ./web/gen that converts https://github.com/mitmproxy/mitmproxy/blob/main/mitmproxy/net/http/status_codes.py to TypeScript. Ideally we add some indicator in the UI that this is not transmitted for h2/h3.
- Colorize response status line background by status code.
- Highlight different URL parts in the request line. This approach from StackOverflow here looks reasonable.
- Add a dedicated "Query" pane for query editing.
Major refactors
- New Layout with extra pane for response. Split existing request/response panes into headers and body?
- Upgrade to the latest CodeMirror (#7709)
- Integrate interactive contentviews.
Source: mitmproxy/mitmproxy