OpenClaw Pre-Release: Mac Settings Redesign, Meme-Maker Skill, Python Debugging, Proxy HTTPS

OpenClaw has shipped a new pre-release (May 18, 2026) with a notably broad set of changes spanning the Mac app, skill ecosystem, proxy infrastructure, and QA tooling.

Mac Settings gets a full redesign. The Settings pages now use consistent card layouts with cached navigation, cleaner permission/voice/skills/cron/exec/debug panes, and steadier spacing around the native sidebar.

Two new skills land. The new meme-maker skill handles curated template search, local SVG/PNG rendering, Imgflip hosted rendering, and Know Your Meme provenance links. A new Python debugging skill adds pdb, breakpoint(), post-mortem inspection, and debugpy remote attach — useful for agents working with Python codebases.

Proxy gains HTTPS support. The Proxy system now supports HTTPS managed forward-proxy endpoints and scoped proxy.tls.caFile CA trust for proxy endpoint TLS, thanks to contributor @jesse-merhi.

QA-Lab scales up significantly. The test harness adds 20-turn and optional 100-turn runtime parity scenarios, with tier metadata for standard and soak QA gates. Tool fixture coverage reporting is now exposed via openclaw qa coverage --tools. A new live-frontier Codex-vs-Pi runtime token-efficiency artifact lane has also been added.

Other notable changes:

  • CLI/plugins: new defineToolPlugin plus openclaw plugins build, validate, and init for typed simple tool plugins
  • Browser: modal dialogs are now surfaced in snapshots, with --dialog-id to answer pending dialogs
  • Obsidian skill now targets the official obsidian CLI instead of the third-party obsidian-cli
  • Docker/Podman: adds OPENCLAW_IMAGE_APT_PACKAGES as a runtime-neutral build arg for extra apt packages
  • Gateway: startup logging now overlaps with channel sidecar startup to reduce restart ready latency

Full release notes are on GitHub.

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