OpenClaw Control UI: "Raw Mode Disabled (snapshot cannot safely round-trip raw text)" — Fixed

If the Raw mode toggle in OpenClaw's Control UI is grayed out or shows the message "Raw mode disabled (snapshot cannot safely round-trip raw text)", this is issue #67926. Here's what it means and how to get raw mode working again.

What Raw Mode Does

Raw mode in the Control UI lets you view the unprocessed JSON snapshot of the current session state — useful for debugging tool calls, inspecting message structure, and diagnosing issues that the formatted view hides. Power users rely on it for understanding exactly what the model is seeing.

Why It Gets Disabled

The error message — "snapshot cannot safely round-trip raw text" — means the Control UI detected content in the current session snapshot that contains characters or sequences that would be corrupted or escaped when rendered as raw JSON and then parsed back. Rather than show you potentially mangled data, it disables raw mode as a safety measure.

Common triggers:

• Session contains large binary content or base64 blobs in tool results
• A tool returned content with unescaped special characters (null bytes, invalid UTF-8)
• An image or file was passed through a tool and left a partial payload in the session state
• Very long code blocks with escaped sequences that interact badly with the snapshot renderer

Fix #1 — Start a New Session

The simplest fix: the problematic content is in the current session. Start a fresh session and raw mode will work again:

/new

If you need to preserve the current session's context, export what matters to your memory files first, then use /new.

Fix #2 — Use the Formatted View Instead

For most debugging purposes, the formatted Control UI view exposes the same information as raw mode in a more readable form. If you just need to see what the model received or what tools were called, the structured view usually covers it.

Fix #3 — Compact the Session First

If the problematic content is from earlier in the session, running /compact may summarize it away, removing the offending payload from the active snapshot:

/compact

After compaction, try toggling raw mode again. If the content that triggered the disable was in older messages, compaction removes it from the active context.

Fix #4 — Check for Binary Tool Results

If raw mode keeps getting disabled in new sessions, a skill or tool is likely returning binary or malformed data. Check your recent tool usage:

# Look for recent tool calls with large or binary responses
openclaw gateway logs | grep -i "tool_result\|binary\|base64" | tail -20

If you find a skill returning image data or file contents directly into the conversation (rather than saving to disk and returning a path), that's the culprit. Configure the skill to return a file path or summary instead of raw binary content.

TL;DR

• "Raw mode disabled" = session snapshot contains content that can't safely round-trip as JSON
• Fix A: /new to start a fresh session
• Fix B: Use formatted view — covers most debug needs
• Fix C: /compact to summarize away the offending content
• Fix D: Check for tools returning binary/base64 data directly into conversation
• Tracking: GitHub issue #67926