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 bycommands.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.
Diagrams
Completed fenced blocks labeledmermaid 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.
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.Multiple Gateway windows
Open Connection… → Gateways to add or remove reusable Gateway profiles. Each profile contains a private-networkws:// or secure wss:// endpoint with
browser sign-in or an optional token or password; credentials are stored in the
macOS Keychain. Entering a hostname in Add Gateway defaults to HTTPS.
For Cloudflare Access, Connect opens the default browser to establish your
personal session. See browser sign-in and website launch links.
Secure token/password 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.
Browser sessions use normal HTTPS trust and remain bound to their authenticated
Gateway origin, including its port. Each browser-authenticated profile has its
own dashboard browser data, isolated across named app profiles. Manual
token/password profiles retain their existing browser store and preferences.
Signing in with your browser starts a personal store without copying credentials
from the shared browser store. Links opened beside a browser-authenticated
dashboard use a separate temporary browser session.
Removing a profile closes its native chat and dashboard windows and shuts down
its secondary connection.
Updating a saved profile’s credentials refreshes its open dashboard windows.
Use Reconnect to renew an expired browser session. Reconnecting the same
account retains its browser preferences. Changing accounts or removing a
browser-authenticated profile clears its isolated dashboard browser data;
removing any profile also removes its saved credentials.
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.
The main Gateways menu is always present. It lists the primary Gateway, when
configured, then saved Gateways, with Command-1 through Command-9 in that order.
Select an item to open its dashboard window or bring its existing window to the
front. Hold Option for New … Window, or use Option-Command with the same digit,
to open another independent window. Cards show health, version and shortened build
ID, endpoint, latency, and open dashboard window count. Browser-authenticated
profiles show Access and session expiry. A Primary badge identifies the
primary Gateway, and a front-window marker follows the frontmost dashboard
window. Manage Gateways… opens Connection → Gateways, even when the list is
empty. For SSH-tunneled primaries, the primary row uses the SSH host name rather
than the loopback tunnel endpoint, unless a matching saved Gateway supplies its name.
The menu probes health only while open, retaining cached facts between openings.
Before the first result a card shows checking…; failed probes show
unreachable and the last successful contact time when known. Closing the menu
cancels in-flight probes and closes idle probe connections for saved Gateways with
no open dashboard windows. It never disconnects the primary Gateway.
The dashboard also reopens your selected Gateway after an app restart.
Choosing Primary switches startup back to the primary Gateway. Background
connection refreshes do not change this selection.
Windows for the same saved profile and browser account share a Gateway
connection, transcript cache, offline outbox, and route leases while staying
independently navigable. Renewing that account’s session preserves its queued
messages. Switching accounts closes the old account’s native chat windows;
its cached history and queued messages stay with that account and are available
when you sign back in. Token/password profiles retain their profile-scoped
cache and device authentication. 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.
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 and browser sign-in 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. Manage channels, Gateway configuration, skills, and cron jobs in the Dashboard for the intended Gateway. Settings… (Cmd-,) opens Dashboard settings; Settings → This Mac controls this Mac’s local capabilities from any embedded Dashboard window. Connection… remains native so you can repair connectivity without a working Dashboard.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. Open Dashboard → Settings → This Mac → App to change the global shortcut in a native recorder panel, then choose Done. 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 under Dashboard → Settings → This Mac → App; the same section opens 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.
Launch and debugging
- Manual: Lobster menu -> “Open Chat”.
-
Auto-open for testing:
(
--webchatis accepted as a legacy alias.) -
Logs:
./scripts/clawlog.sh(subsystemai.openclaw, categoryWebChatSwiftUI).
How it is wired
- Data plane: Gateway WS methods
chat.history,chat.message.get,chat.send,chat.abort,chat.inject, plusquestion.listandquestion.resolve, and eventschat,agent,presence,tick,health; question cards followquestion.requestedandquestion.resolvedevents and refresh fromquestion.listafter reconnects. chat.historyreturns 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 exactNO_REPLY/no_replyare 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, andsessions.groups.deleteown the path-free group catalog. Write-scopedsessions.groups.defaultsandsessions.groups.updateown optional New Session folder/worktree defaults. Membership is the sessioncategoryupdated throughsessions.patchor assigned duringsessions.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 inclient-state.sqlitein the same directory. Cold opens paint cached transcripts before the connection is ready and refresh once the Gateway responds.
Security surface
- Remote mode forwards only the Gateway WebSocket control port over SSH.
Known limitations
- The UI is optimized for chat sessions, not a full browser sandbox.