What makes it different

Alabaster builds on Mainsail and Fluidd, two established Klipper web interfaces, and borrows many of the interface elements they already get right. This page covers what it adds on top: conveniences and customization.

Everything below either does not exist in established Klipper web interfaces, or exists there in a different form. Each section links to the page that covers it in full.

Time-to-temperature for each heater

Every interface shows a temperature and a target. Alabaster also shows how long it will take to get there.

It learns each heater's climb curve from your machine: the real time it takes to cross every five-degree band on the way up. The estimate accounts for a hot end that slows down above 200 °C and a bed that takes four minutes for its last ten degrees.

Alabaster shows three things a bare reading does not:

• ~4 min: when the heater will reach its target.
• 8°/min: the current climb rate.
• Not climbing: the heater has a target but is not reaching it. This can flag a loose thermistor, a failed heater cartridge, or a part fan pointed the wrong way. The warning appears immediately, before you would notice a slow climb on your own.

It works like a stopwatch, not a simulation of Klipper's control loop, so it stays accurate whether the heater runs PID or MPC.

→ Temperatures

Print progress compared to the slicer estimate

Most interfaces show the slicer's remaining-time guess, which counts down one second per second.

Alabaster compares actual progress to that guess and reports the difference, for example 12% behind the slicer estimate. You set the threshold that triggers a warning. You can also choose where the progress estimate comes from: the slicer's own M73 output, the position in the file, or filament consumed, or leave it on the best source available.

It also shows the time of day the print will finish.

→ Print

Maintenance intervals tracked from printer history

Set an interval, for example belt tension every 200 print hours, nozzle every 5000 metres of filament, or lubricate rails every 90 days. Alabaster counts it against the printer's own lifetime totals from Moonraker's history, not against a reminder you update yourself.

Starting a print while an interval is overdue asks you first. You can open Maintenance, start anyway, or wait.

→ Maintenance

Bed mesh view

The bed mesh renders as a height map, not a grid of colored squares:

• Ten projections: perspective, orthographic, isometric, dimetric, trimetric, cavalier, cabinet, one-point, two-point, fisheye.
• Five render styles: surface, bars, contour lines, terraced, mosaic.
• A fixed color scale as well as a self-scaling one. A fixed scale lets you compare two meshes directly; a self-scaling one does not.

Two warnings come from the mesh, and both catch a real problem:

• Bed range: the bed varies by more than the amount you called acceptable.
• Probe temperature drift: you probed the mesh at 60 °C but the bed now targets 100 °C. A mesh measured cold and used hot is wrong, and nothing else reports it.

Calibration plots each point as it is probed, so a run that is going wrong is visible before it finishes. A scanning probe has no per-point data to plot; Calibration states this instead of showing an empty grid.

→ Bed mesh · Calibration

printer.cfg with linked includes

Configuration in Alabaster is a linked document, not a plain text box.

• [include] targets are links. Ctrl+click one to open it.
• Alabaster offers to create a missing target, along with its folder if that is missing too, so you can build a configuration downward from its include list.
• Alabaster offers to rewrite the include when you move an included file. Choose move and update, move only, or don't move. An include pointing at nothing is enough by itself to stop Klipper from starting.
• Add to printer.cfg and Remove from printer.cfg are on each file's own menu, and the list marks files already included.

Edits survive everything except a browser reload. Each file keeps its own buffer for as long as the tab is open, and Alabaster flags an unsaved edit on the file, on every folder above it, and in the navigation, visible from any page.

→ Configuration

G-code viewer for large files

A 100 MB print begins drawing about a quarter of a second in and keeps filling in while the rest downloads and parses. You can orbit the model before it finishes loading.

• Following a live print walks the real moves in the file. The toolhead follows the actual path; corners stay corners instead of sliding between telemetry samples and cutting across a curve.
• Geometry ahead of the print is not drawn, rather than dimmed, so the frontier matches where printing has reached.
• Simulation mode replays any slice at up to 20×, with a scrubber, with no printer connected.
• Rendering quality adapts to your device and reduces detail to keep the view responsive. The layer currently printing always draws at full precision.
• Open a local file without uploading it, to check a slice before committing to it.

→ G-code viewer

All confirmations on one page

Confirmations are a personal setting. Most interfaces make you find each one where it lives, or give you no way to turn them off at all.

Alabaster lists every confirmation in the application on one page, grouped by area, each with its own checkbox. Turn off individual confirmations and keep the ones you want. A global override turns off all of them, and states which individual settings it overrides.

→ Settings

Separate layouts per device

The dashboard keeps separate layouts for desktop, tablet, and phone. Card order, column, width, visibility, and collapsed state are set per viewport. A card's own configuration is shared across all three: temperature presets set up on desktop also appear on your phone.

Layouts are scoped to the printer's identity, not its address. Moving a printer to a new hostname, reaching it through a tunnel, or connecting by IP address instead keeps the same dashboard.

Modules that support it can appear more than once, for example one Macros card per group. Each card has its own name, color-coded buttons, and its own rule for which printer states it appears in.

→ Customizing the dashboard

Accessibility guarantees

Automated tests enforce these guarantees and fail the build when one breaks:

Guarantee	Enforced by
Every control variant clears 4.5:1 contrast over every surface it can sit on: at rest, hovered, and pressed	a contrast test
Chromatic color never leaves the Okabe-Ito color-blind-safe palette	a palette test
Every animation has a reduced-motion fallback	a motion test
Every clickable control comes from one button system, and none of them move on hover or press	an interaction test
Every locale matches the English schema, with no empty messages	a locale test

In addition, Alabaster never carries status by color alone, and window.confirm, window.prompt, and window.alert appear nowhere in the application. Every confirmation is a real dialog that names what it will affect.

Alabaster also offers five typefaces, including OpenDyslexic, a separate typeface for the console, and a text-weight setting. This covers both a workshop screen read from two metres away and a phone held at arm's length.

→ Accessibility · Theming

Additional features

• Pause at a layer. Arm a pause at layer 47, or pause when the current layer finishes. Useful for color changes and embedded magnets.
• Bed plan. Click a spot on a picture of your bed to send the nozzle there.
• Z offset in micrometres, with a legend showing which direction is closer to the bed, and a direction swap for printers whose bed moves instead of the gantry.
• Command browser. Search every command your machine reports, with the help text Klipper provides. This includes macros you wrote yourself, which are not covered by any documentation.
• Live endstop readout on Calibration, polled while the printer is idle and paused while it prints.
• A manual probe brings its own prompt. The prompt reaches you on any page when Klipper stops to ask where the bed is, regardless of what started it, and you can dismiss it and return to it later without answering it.
• Input-shaper graphs read straight from the config folder, so tuning results appear in the interface instead of in a folder you have to find separately.
• Peripherals. Lists the serial, USB, and CAN devices attached to the host, so finding the right /dev/serial/by-id path or CAN UUID takes a page instead of an SSH session.
• Save new config, summarized. If Klipper is holding a probe offset, a heater model, and a mesh, the summary lists which ones, and it waits for the print to finish rather than offering to end it.
• Repository recovery. Alabaster offers a dirty, invalid, detached, or corrupt update source the specific recovery it needs, rather than a single generic failure message.
• Roll back an update. You can revert a git-tracked source, such as Klipper, Moonraker, or a git-based client, to the version it had before its last update. Alabaster guards a rollback the same way it guards an install.
• Screen wake lock for a shop-floor display watching a print.
• Logs into a printer that requires it. Stays hidden on the trusted-LAN setup most printers use, and appears when a printer is configured to require a login.
• Time and date format overrides, independent of language, so you can choose a different clock format than the one your locale implies.