openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix TUI entry point UX: `openclaw chat` silently does nothing, `autolab` alias gone, `tui` not discoverable [2 comments, 1 participants]

Summary

The path from terminal to chat TUI is broken from a user-discovery standpoint. Three related problems:

1. openclaw chat silently exits 0 with no output

Running openclaw chat (or openclaw chat --help) produces zero output and exits cleanly. No error, no "unknown command", no hint. User assumes the install is broken.

$ openclaw chat
$ openclaw chat --help
$ echo $?
0

Expected: either alias chat → tui, or print an unknown-command error with a "Did you mean openclaw tui?" hint.

2. autolab binary no longer exists, no back-compat shim

Lots of muscle memory + docs still reference autolab chat / autolab / node index.js chat. After rebrand, none of these work and there's no shim.

$ autolab chat
zsh: command not found: autolab

Expected: install a thin autolab shim that prints a deprecation notice and forwards to openclaw (at minimum for one or two release cycles).

3. openclaw tui is the real entry but is not discoverable

The TUI command is named tui. Nobody types tui first — they type chat, repl, or interactive. The help output also doesn't surface "this is how you start chatting with your agent in the terminal" anywhere prominent.

Expected:

• Add chat as a top-level alias for tui
• Mention it in the bare openclaw help output / onboarding banner
• Doc page at /cli/chat that redirects to /cli/tui

Environment

• OpenClaw 2026.4.12 (f9b1079)
• macOS (Darwin 25.2.0 arm64)
• Installed via Homebrew (/opt/homebrew/bin/openclaw)
• Shell: zsh

Reproduction

which autolab            # not found
openclaw chat            # silent, exit 0
openclaw chat --help     # silent, exit 0
openclaw tui --help      # works

Suggested fix (in order of impact)

1. Add chat alias for tui in the CLI command registry — one-line fix, biggest UX win.
2. Fix the silent-exit bug on unknown subcommands (chat shouldn't be matching anything if it's not registered — it should error with a suggestion).
3. Restore autolab shim as a deprecation forwarder for at least one release.
4. Onboarding banner: after openclaw configure / openclaw onboard, print "➡️ Start chatting: openclaw chat".

Priority

High — this is the literal first thing a new user does after install, and it currently looks broken.

Reported via Nexus on behalf of @danvallier