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The macOS menu bar app embeds the WebChat UI as a native SwiftUI view. It connects to the Gateway and defaults to the primary session for the selected agent (main, or global when session.scope is global). The full chat window is a native split view:
  • Sessions sidebar: searchable session list with pinned, gateway-backed group, and recent sections. Spawned child sessions nest beneath their parent inside each section; collapsed parents summarize running, failed, and unread descendants. Context menus support session info, rename, pin, fork, read/unread, archive/restore, copy session key, and delete. The primary new-session action (or Shift-Cmd-N) creates immediately via sessions.create; its adjacent options popover can select an agent and request a managed worktree with an optional base ref.
  • Window toolbar: conversation title, Find in Conversation, and a session actions menu. The menu can rename or fork the current session and update its pin, read, or archive state. Sessions… (Shift-Cmd-S) opens the Active/Archived manager for gateway search, group management, session inspection, rename, pin, archive, and restore. Select mode applies pin, unpin, archive, or delete to several active sessions while keeping individual failures visible. Separate menu checkmarks show or hide assistant reasoning and tool activity; both are on by default and remembered across launches.
  • Transcript and composer: a centered reading column keeps messages and the composer aligned in wide windows. Assistant messages render as plain text with an avatar, user messages as accent bubbles. The rounded composer grows with multiline drafts and keeps its controls in a compact footer beneath the text, matching web and iOS. The + menu contains attachments, branches, and tool-call verbosity. The context ring shows token usage and session cost and offers Compact Thread. The model menu groups models by provider, keeps pinned and recent models at the top, and lets you pin or unpin the selected model. Effort contains thinking and Fast response settings. Controls adapt to narrow windows while keeping voice and send actions visible. Return sends; Shift-Return inserts a newline. Copy, Reply, Listen, and a message actions menu appear beneath messages; right-click actions remain available. Pending agent questions render as native cards with single- or multi-select options, free-text Other answers, expiry countdowns, and shared terminal state. Empty chats offer desktop starter prompts. Typing / opens slash-command autocomplete backed by commands.list, with arrow/Tab/Return/Escape keyboard navigation. Right-click a message to copy its visible Markdown without hidden reasoning. Truncated assistant messages also offer Open Full Message, which loads a selectable Markdown reader. Use Listen for gateway TTS with a local speech fallback.
  • Find in Conversation: press Cmd-F to search user and assistant text in the loaded conversation. Return or Cmd-G moves to the next matching message; Shift-Cmd-G moves backward. The selected message is outlined and revealed without incoming replies pulling you away. Escape closes Find. Search does not fetch older history or search hidden reasoning and tool payloads.
  • Voice controls: the composer can start or stop the existing macOS Talk Mode without replacing its menu-bar overlay. While Talk Mode is active, the composer shows its listening/thinking/speaking state, live audio activity, and an expandable rolling transcript. Right-click the Talk button to choose System Default or a connected microphone; this is the same microphone selection used by Voice Wake and push-to-talk. If a selected microphone disconnects, the active Talk session falls back to the system default and tries the selection again the next time Talk Mode starts. A separate microphone action records a voice note when Talk Mode does not own audio capture.
The anchored compact chat panel from the menu bar keeps the compact single-column layout with the same model, thinking, verbosity, and Fast controls inline, plus starter prompts, Talk Mode, voice notes, and Listen. Assistant reasoning and tool activity remain hidden in this compact surface.

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Diagrams

Completed fenced blocks labeled mermaid render as diagrams in native chat, including Quick Chat. Rendering runs locally using bundled assets. A fence is complete when its closing delimiter arrives or the response finishes; incomplete streaming fences remain code. Use the small options button at the top right to view or copy the source and expand the diagram. The copy button also appears on hover or keyboard focus. Click the diagram to open its vector preview, where you can zoom and pan. Close the preview with its close button or Escape. In Quick Chat, closing the preview returns to the reply; clicking outside both the bar and its preview dismisses Quick Chat. Invalid or oversized diagrams keep their source readable. Temporary rendering failures offer Retry diagram in the options menu.

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Session colors

Right-click a session in the sidebar, or open its menu-bar session submenu, and choose Color. Select red, blue, green, yellow, purple, orange, pink, or cyan. Default clears the color. A colored session has a narrow leading stripe in sidebar and menu-bar rows and a small dot beside its open chat title. Unset colors show neither marker. The Gateway stores color names, not hex values; the app adjusts their hues for light and dark appearances.

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Multiple Gateway windows

Open Settings → Gateways to add or remove reusable Gateway profiles. Each profile contains a private-network ws:// or secure wss:// endpoint and its optional token or password; credentials are stored in the macOS Keychain. Secure profiles maintain their own system-trust-gated first-use certificate pin and do not inherit gateway.remote.tlsFingerprint from the primary Gateway. Dashboard windows enforce that same saved-profile pinning policy. Removing a profile closes its native chat windows and shuts down its secondary connection. Dashboard windows showing that profile return to Primary. Updating a saved profile’s credentials refreshes its open dashboard windows. Choose File → New Gateway Window… or press Cmd-N, then select one of those saved profiles. The picker remembers the most recently used profile. Every selection creates a new independent window, so the same Gateway can appear in multiple windows with different active sessions and navigation state. Each saved profile owns one shared Gateway connection, device-auth scope, transcript cache, offline outbox, and route leases. Windows for that profile reuse those resources while staying independently navigable. Windows for different profiles stay connected and run chats simultaneously. The menu-bar app’s configured Gateway remains the owner of Mac node capabilities and Talk Mode. Additional Gateway windows are operator-only, so a second Gateway cannot silently retarget global microphone or device controls. Listen/TTS and normal chat actions use the window’s own Gateway connection. Inline widgets also load from that window’s Gateway.

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Gateway picker

The dashboard header shows a Gateway picker when the Mac app has at least two configured Gateways. Choose a Gateway to replace the current dashboard in the same window, or Option-click it to open a separate dashboard window. Set as primary… makes the viewed token-authenticated profile the Mac app’s primary Gateway after confirmation. The app replaces the primary Gateway’s credentials and closes its native chat window; independent saved-profile windows stay open. Dashboard windows displaying Primary follow the new connection, including windows opened separately. While connected, the sidebar footer also shows the current Gateway and marks it when it is primary. Password-only profiles can be viewed but cannot be made primary. Native dashboard commands such as New Session and the command palette act on the frontmost Gateway window. Native approval cards and dialogs apply only to the Gateway connection that requested them. Changing Primary does not transfer a pending approval to the new Gateway. The native Channels and Config settings follow Primary. Changing Primary clears the previous Gateway’s channel status, login QR, and unsaved config draft, then loads the new Gateway’s settings. A temporary reconnect to the same Primary keeps its WhatsApp login session and config draft. If the connection fails, these panes show the Gateway error and keep Refresh or Reload available. Connection attempts show progress, and retries retain the last failure until the Gateway connects or Primary changes. Opening or revisiting these panes while settings load waits for the current Gateway’s shared read. Background refreshes preserve unsaved edits; Reload replaces them with the Gateway’s current values.

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Cron jobs when switching Gateways

By default, Settings → Cron Jobs links to the Dashboard. Enable Settings → Debug → Show native settings panes to use the native pane, which shows the Primary Gateway’s jobs and run history. Run, enable, edit, delete, and transcript actions stay with the Gateway that supplied the displayed job. After changing Primary, reopen the job from the new list before acting on it. A socket reconnect to the same Gateway keeps an open editor usable and reloads the selected job before refreshing its history. While jobs load, the pane shows a loading indicator and disables Refresh. A failed load shows the Gateway error and enables Refresh to try again. “No cron jobs yet” appears only after the Gateway returns an empty list. You can draft a New Job while offline. Saving can reconnect or start that Gateway, but changing Primary while the editor is open does not move the draft to the new Gateway. The app reports the change so you can reopen the editor for the intended Gateway.

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Quick Chat bar

Press Option-Space (⌥Space) or choose Quick Chat from the menu bar menu to open a floating composer for the main session. Change the global shortcut with the recorder in Settings → General → Quick Chat shortcut. Quick Chat shows the targeted agent (avatar or emoji, with the agent’s name as the placeholder) and sends to that agent’s main session. After Return accepts a send, the bar stays open and expands downward with the streamed Markdown reply and recent transcript. The bar input remains the composer. Press Command-Return to send and open the same target in the full chat window, Shift-Return for a newline, or Escape to dismiss the whole bar and reply area. Clicking outside also dismisses it. When relevant macOS permissions are missing, an attached strip offers Grant and Not now actions. Use the microphone button to dictate into the composer. Partial speech results replace the dictated span live while preserving text that was already in the composer. Press the button again, Return, or Escape to stop; sending, hiding, or unfocusing Quick Chat also releases the microphone. The first use asks for macOS Microphone and Speech Recognition access. Quick Chat uses Apple Speech and may use its network services; only passive Voice Wake requires on-device recognition. The compact model control shows the target session’s current model and reasoning level. A model choice updates that session and therefore persists there, while a reasoning choice applies only to each message sent from the current Quick Chat presentation. Local choices reset when the bar hides. Switching agents or choosing a recent session keeps explicit choices but reloads the newly targeted session’s underlying model state. Click the history button to choose from the five most recently updated sessions or return to New message to <agent>. A recent selection sends to that exact session and changes the placeholder to Reply in <session>. Hiding Quick Chat resets this temporary target to the selected agent’s main session; switching agents from the avatar menu also clears it. Command-Return opens the conversation of the agent that received the send, including when session scope is global. The camera button opens a menu for Capture Window… or Capture Area…. Window capture labels every visible window; area capture dims each display while you drag a region and shows its live size. The selected screenshot is sent to the chosen agent with any typed text as its caption. The first use asks for macOS Screen Recording access. Escape, clicking empty space, or clicking without a meaningful area drag cancels. Use the document-text button to attach text from the focused app’s focused window. Quick Chat shows the result as a removable context chip rather than placing the captured text in the composer; sending appends the chip’s text to the outgoing message and then clears it. This requires macOS Accessibility permission. Attached text also clears whenever Quick Chat closes, so context from one presentation cannot leak into a later send. After a reply finishes, choose Paste to <app> to copy its visible assistant text, excluding hidden reasoning, to the general pasteboard and paste it into the app that was frontmost. This requires macOS Accessibility permission. The action replaces the current pasteboard contents and then hides Quick Chat. Disable the feature entirely with Settings → General → Quick Chat; the same section hosts the shortcut recorder.
  • Local mode: connects directly to the local Gateway WebSocket.
  • Remote mode: uses the configured direct ws:///wss:// route or the app-managed SSH tunnel as the data plane.

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Launch and debugging

  • Manual: Lobster menu -> “Open Chat”.
  • Auto-open for testing:
    (--webchat is accepted as a legacy alias.)
  • Logs: ./scripts/clawlog.sh (subsystem ai.openclaw, category WebChatSwiftUI).

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How it is wired

  • Data plane: Gateway WS methods chat.history, chat.message.get, chat.send, chat.abort, chat.inject, plus question.list and question.resolve, and events chat, agent, presence, tick, health; question cards follow question.requested and question.resolved events and refresh from question.list after reconnects.
  • chat.history returns a display-normalized transcript: inline directive tags are stripped from visible text, plain-text tool-call XML payloads (<tool_call>, <function_call>, <tool_calls>, <function_calls>, including truncated blocks) and leaked model control tokens are stripped, pure silent-token assistant rows such as exact NO_REPLY/no_reply are omitted, and oversized rows can be replaced with a truncated placeholder.
  • Session: defaults to the primary session as above; the UI can switch between sessions.
  • Session groups: sessions.groups.list, sessions.groups.put, sessions.groups.rename, and sessions.groups.delete own the path-free group catalog. Write-scoped sessions.groups.defaults and sessions.groups.update own optional New Session folder/worktree defaults. Membership is the session category updated through sessions.patch or assigned during sessions.create.
  • Unread state: after a session activates and its live history loads successfully, the app clears the unread state it observed. A manual unread marker created while that session is already open remains through refreshes and run completion; leave and reopen the session, or mark it read explicitly, to clear it. Failed history loads do not clear unread state, and a transient patch failure retries on the next activation. During staggered upgrades, an older active app can still send a bare read acknowledgement that clears the marker. Cross-client protection therefore requires every active app to support the acknowledgement contract; update all connected clients before relying on the reminder.
  • Onboarding uses a dedicated session to keep first-run setup separate.
  • Offline storage: recent sessions and transcripts are cached per Gateway in ~/Library/Application Support/OpenClaw/databases/gateway-cache.sqlite. Client-owned pending commands and routing state live separately in client-state.sqlite in the same directory. Cold opens paint cached transcripts before the connection is ready and refresh once the Gateway responds.

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Security surface

  • Remote mode forwards only the Gateway WebSocket control port over SSH.

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Known limitations

  • The UI is optimized for chat sessions, not a full browser sandbox.