openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix [Bug]: TUI never registers with gateway — sessions.resolve fails, causing input echo lag and web UI sync issues [1 participants]

Environment

• OpenClaw version: 2026.3.28 (f9b1079)
• OS: Linux 6.17.9-76061709-generic x64
• Node: 25.8.1
• Gateway mode: local, loopback, port 18789

Summary

openclaw tui has a persistent TCP connection to the gateway (port 18789) but never appears as an authenticated WebSocket client in gateway logs. As a result, sessions.resolve("openclaw-tui") fails, the TUI can't subscribe to real-time gateway events, and falls back to a degraded local render path.

Symptoms

1. Input echo lag — keystrokes are noticeably delayed before appearing in the TUI composer
2. Responses not visible in web UI — TUI session activity is invisible to the web UI dashboard
3. Web UI re-prints full history on every new message (falls back to chat.history polling instead of incremental streaming)

Evidence

Gateway log: TUI never connects as a WebSocket client

Across a full day of gateway logs, the only connected WebSocket clients are openclaw-control-ui (web UI) and cli probe connections. The TUI process has an established TCP connection to port 18789 (confirmed via ss), but zero "connected" log entries:

$ ss -tnp | grep 18789
ESTAB  127.0.0.1:18789  127.0.0.1:51248  openclaw-gateway (pid=1327367)
ESTAB  127.0.0.1:51248  127.0.0.1:18789  openclaw-tui (pid=1327965)

$ grep '"client":' gateway.log | sort | uniq -c
3  "client":"cli"
# no "client":"openclaw-tui" or any tui entry

sessions.resolve failure

On every TUI startup (and web UI connect), the gateway returns:

sessions.resolve  INVALID_REQUEST  "No session found: openclaw-tui"

Two connections hit this simultaneously — one is the TUI trying to find its own session, one appears to be the web UI trying to subscribe to TUI activity.

The actual session is stored as agent:main:main with origin.label = "openclaw-tui", but there is no label→key mapping the gateway can use to resolve it.

Session store

{
  "agent:main:main": {
    "origin": { "label": "openclaw-tui", "provider": "webchat", "surface": "webchat" },
    "lastChannel": "webchat"
  }
}

No openclaw-tui key exists — only agent:main:main and cron sessions.

Root Cause (hypothesis)

sessions.resolve only looks up sessions by their store key (agent:main:main), not by origin label (openclaw-tui). The TUI connects to the gateway but either:

• Never completes the WebSocket auth handshake (explaining the missing "connected" log), or
• Completes it under an identity the gateway doesn't map back to the session store

Either way, the TUI never gets a valid subscription to its own session's event stream, forcing everything onto a poll/fallback path.

Impact

All three symptoms share this single root cause. A fix to sessions.resolve to support label→key lookup (or ensuring the TUI registers its connection identity against the session store on connect) should resolve input echo lag, web UI sync, and history re-printing together.