How To Shut Up OpenClaw CLI Banner 🦞

Every time you run an OpenClaw command, you’re greeted with a little lobster and a “funny” tagline: 🦞 OpenClaw 2026.2.15 (3fe22ea) Gateway online—please keep hands, feet, and appendages inside the shell at all times. Cute the first time but by the hundredth invocation you start wondering if the lobster is mocking you personally. Moreover, it becomes hard to distinguish the outputs from your command with those vertical spaces. I went down the plugin rabbit hole trying to suppress it — turns out the banner fires during CLI bootstrap, before the plugin system even loads. So no, you can’t write a plugin to kill it. The lobster is faster than you. But buried in the source code there’s a single env var doing the lord’s work: Add to your ~/.zshrc (or ~/.bashrc): export OPENCLAW_HIDE_BANNER=1 That’s it. One line. source ~/.zshrc and the lobster goes silent. You’re welcome. And if you're an stingy OpenClaw user, check out Manifest and stop paying too much tokens by routing queries to the right