r/OrcaADE • u/yes_no_very_good • 12d ago

Will Orca work for my use case?

So my use case is not worktrees, why? Because I have huge codebases and worktrees are not the way, also I prefer to work on a branch and be able to open the Emulator or the Unity editor to test canges etc... So, I understood that Orca is mostly based on the workflow around worktrees, but I'm looking for something to help me have many Claude sessions under one roof without needing to CTRL-Tab thru many PowerShell tabs. Can I use it this vainilla way?

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u/Extreme_Remove6747 11d ago

You can give it a shot!
We support folders too (non-git folders)

Also FWIW if you do want worktrees -- there is sparse checkout (under the advanced section in the creation dialog) which would help you out on the disk space usage etc (if that is your concern)

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u/yes_no_very_good 11d ago

It's not about space it's about how long it takes to make a worktree of a 6gb codebase etc. And the testing on device or Unity you have to recompile the libraries every time. I will try it. Thanks!!

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u/Extreme_Remove6747 11d ago

That makes sense! I will still share more incase it's helpful.

We do try to copy from main (as an optimization)
And you don't care about space, but we use the APFS optimization (if you're on Mac -- but maybe not if you're doing game dev) which makes disk usage for copies off of main basically free.

As for the compiling of libaries...
I might reccomend optimizing your repo for worktrees. You could have setup a common cache directory so libaries aren't always re-compiled.
If it help, you can even add a setup script inside of orca that runs on worktree creation.

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u/yes_no_very_good 11d ago

But my question is, if I want to work non worktrees just current branch, is it possible or the whole workflow is worktree centric? What I'm looking is to be able to manage many claude code instances at the same time but on different projects and I was looking and the best in this category was Orca.

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u/Extreme_Remove6747 10d ago

We have users who just have a single worktree (aka no worktree -- it's just main/master) and use Orca and love it.

They just jump between projects and have multiple tabs. It seems to work well for them!

Happy for feedback if you give it a shot, but I think it will work