How to Open a Specific Folder from an External Hard Drive(SSD) as a Project in Orca?

[Trapa-Eureka]

I have a folder called work on my external hard drive.

Inside the work folder are many project folders. I'd like to open only one specific subfolder as a project. Is there a way to do that?

Right now, whenever I try to open one specific project folder inside work, Orca opens the entire work folder along with all of its subfolders instead of just the selected project folder.

[nwparker]

@brennanb2025 can you assit here?
May be somewhat related to #1010

[brennanb2025]

Hi @Trapa-Eureka, thanks for the question!

Some background on what Orca does when you pick a folder: it first checks whether that folder is inside a Git repository. If it is, Orca opens the repository root (the equivalent of git rev-parse --show-toplevel) rather than the exact subfolder you selected — branches, worktrees, and diffs all need the repo root to work correctly. If the folder isn't inside any Git repo, Orca opens exactly the folder you picked.

So what you're describing strongly suggests that work itself (or possibly the root of the SSD) is a Git repository — i.e. there's a .git at work/.git — and your individual project folders don't have repos of their own. Could you verify? From inside one of the project folders, run:

git rev-parse --show-toplevel

If that prints the path of work (or the drive root), that's the cause. From there, depending on what you want:

1. If work being a repo is accidental (e.g. a stray git init at the top level at some point): removing work/.git will make Orca treat each project folder independently. Only do this if you're certain nothing depends on that repo — it deletes the Git history stored there.
2. If each project should be its own repo: run git init inside each project folder. Git treats a nested repo as its own boundary, so selecting that folder in Orca will then open just that project — this works even if work remains a repo above it.
3. If your projects aren't Git repos at all and you want to open one as a plain folder: that works today, but only when the folder isn't nested inside a larger repo — which brings you back to option 1 or 2.

Let me know what git rev-parse --show-toplevel prints (or whether work/.git exists). If neither turns out to be the case, please share the exact path you're selecting and the path Orca ends up opening, and I'll dig further.