u-claw/portable/skills/en/uclaw-help/SKILL.md

name, description, metadata

name	description	metadata
uclaw-help	Answer questions about U-Claw itself — how it works, where things are, what went wrong	openclaw emoji 🦞

About U-Claw

You are running inside U-Claw. When someone asks how it works, where a setting lives, or why something is not behaving, answer from this file rather than guessing or sending them to a manual.

This exists because a product you can ask is a product nobody has to learn.

What U-Claw is

An AI assistant that lives on a USB drive. Plug the drive into any Mac or Windows machine and it runs — no installer, no admin rights, nothing left behind except a rebuildable cache.

The three reasons it is on a drive at all:

1. Work computers often will not let you install software. A drive needs no installer and no admin rights.
2. Your setup travels with you. Keys, chat history and memory live in data/ on the drive, not on whichever machine you borrowed.
3. Nothing meaningful is left on the host. One caveat, worth stating plainly: U-Claw does write a rebuildable cache to the host's local disk so that startup is not painfully slow on a USB drive. There is a clean-up in advanced/.

What is on the drive

START HERE - Windows.bat   double-click this
START HERE - Mac.command   or this
Read me first.html         the three-step walkthrough
advanced/                  diagnostics, CLI, install-to-PC, build scripts
skills/                    skill content and manifest.json
lib/                       launcher, i18n, helpers
app/                       Node.js and OpenClaw (not in git)
data/                      settings, memory, backups — this is the user's data

Only three things in the root are clickable. Everything else is in advanced/ on purpose: twenty-three files used to greet people on first plug-in.

Where things live

Thing	Where
API key and model choice	data/.openclaw/openclaw.json
What the AI remembers	data/memory/
Chosen language	uclaw.locale in the same config
Chosen role and interface tier	uclaw.personas and uclaw.tier
Diagnostics report	data/.openclaw/diagnostics.txt
Skills	skills/ on the drive; installed copies under app/core/

Common questions

How do I change the model or key? Open Settings — the launcher opens it on first run, and Config.html in advanced/ redirects there any time. Paste a different key; U-Claw works out the provider from the key itself. A model dropdown appears once the key checks out.

How do I switch language? Settings has it, and the choice is stored on the drive rather than in the browser, so it follows the drive to another machine.

I want to see more (or fewer) options. Settings has a "how much do you want to see" control with three levels. Simple hides endpoints, model names and config files entirely.

Where did my settings go on the other computer? They did not — they are on the drive. If they seem missing, the drive may have been copied rather than moved, or you are looking at a second copy.

Can I use it without internet? Yes, with a local model — advanced/Mac-LocalModel.command or Windows-LocalModel.bat sets one up against Ollama or a self-hosted endpoint. Everything else needs to reach your model provider.

Is my data being uploaded? Your key and conversations stay in data/ on the drive. There is no telemetry, no device fingerprinting and no account. What does leave the machine is your messages, to whichever model provider you configured — exactly as they would in that provider's own app. If that is not acceptable, use the local model option.

Which file system should the drive use? exFAT. macOS can only read NTFS, not write to it, which would break the whole "your settings travel with you" idea.

When something is wrong

U-Claw checks and repairs itself before complaining. If startup failed and could not be fixed, it writes data/.openclaw/diagnostics.txt — system details, what it tried, and the settings with every key redacted. The user can read it before deciding to share it.

Things it fixes by itself: missing folders, a damaged settings file (the original is kept, never deleted), a leftover port record from a crash, an interrupted copy of the app, a cache link left by a different computer.

Things it will not do: kill a process it did not start. If every port from 18789 to 18799 is busy, U-Claw is probably already running in another window.

Answering well

• Do it rather than describe it where you can. "How do I switch to Chinese?" is better answered by changing it than by explaining which menu to open.
• Say when you do not know. This file covers U-Claw; it does not cover OpenClaw's own dashboard, which is a separate upstream project.
• Do not invent paths or settings. If a question is about something not listed above, say so — a confidently wrong file path costs more than an admission.
• Keep answers to the length the question deserves. Most are one or two sentences.