Why I picked Orca and What I think Orca is missing

[KieranP]

Hello Orca Devs,

I've been using Ghostty and Worktrunk for a while. I decided to see what other options there were. After reviewing a handful of ADE's or Terminal apps today (Superset, Emdash, Nimbalyst, CMux, Zentty), I have decided to stick with Orca as my perferred ADE.

Here is why I chose Orca (some of these overlap with other apps, but from what I could see, only Orca could do all of them):

• Built in worktree support, with customizable relative worktree folder path, and custom branch prefix and branch name options (some hardcoded the path, others didn't provide prefix support or always used random worktree/branch names, like howling-gopher, which wasn't helpful)
• Ability to just start agent in the master/main branch (some didn't support this, you always had to work within a worktree)
• Support plain ZSH terminals (some only support panes with auto-started agents, try to exit to shell and you lose the pane or it restarts the agent)

I wasn't looking for much else, but only Orca seems to support those three (what I'd consider "basic") functions. So a big thank you and hats off to you all for the amazing work. And I tried the experimental Agent Dashboard and Agents View, looks amazing. Keep up the great work :-)

All that said, as with any app, it's not without some rough edges. Here is what I've found, mostly to do with the file tree/file editing experience:

• Orca uses a lot of RAM. Sitting idle (no open termainls, agents, etc), according to Orca's inbuilt resource manager, Orca is consuming 1.07 GB RSS, doing nothing... (this is after using the "Kill all sessions" and "Restart daemons" functions).

Once I get a few agents in worktrees running, that quickly baloons over 3GB. So it needs some memory tuning, seems like Orca is having a hard time freeing memory.

• Terminal/agents seems to be really quick (probably because of the CPU rendering support), but file opening/editing seems sluggish. On one occasion, I tried to open a file and it took maybe 1.5s to open and highlight properly, and expanding/collapsing folders takes 1-2s, so this needs some performance work,
• Lack of support for language themes, syntax highlighting extensions, and file tree icon sets. I have some non-common files types that currently unhighlighted, and I'm not seeing any settings to add additional grammars. I also see settings for the terminal theme, but not for file editing theme.
• Lack of support for language servers, for things like highlighting typescript errors, or running eslint, rubocop, etc LSPs and highlighting linting errors.

So for now, I might have to stick to Zed as my code editor for the moment, and use Orca mainly for agents/terminals.

Once again, thanks for the great work.