How To Shut Up OpenClaw CLI Banner 🦞

Source: Dev.to

How to shut up the 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.

The fix

There’s a single environment variable that controls the banner. Add the following line to your shell’s startup file (~/.zshrc, ~/.bashrc, etc.):

export OPENCLAW_HIDE_BANNER=1

Then reload the file (e.g., source ~/.zshrc) and the lobster goes silent. That’s it—one line.

And if you’re a stingy OpenClaw user, check out Manifest and stop paying too many tokens by routing queries to the right LLM.