Rule-Based Routing Engine
The pain of a traditional global proxy is that everything goes through the tunnel — local sites get slower for no reason. Clash's rules engine matches every connection against domain names, IP ranges and GEOIP databases, then routes it by proxy-groups into direct, proxied or blocked traffic: local sites connect directly, overseas services go through the proxy, and ad or tracker domains are simply rejected. Rule sets support remote subscriptions and scheduled updates, so there's nothing to maintain by hand; browsers, terminals and background processes each follow their own path without interfering with one another, and no per-app configuration is required. This rule-driven automatic routing is exactly what sets Clash apart from ordinary proxy tools — see the handbook and the config-file deep dive for rule syntax.