Orca CLI

Use orca when Orca's running editor/runtime is the source of truth. Inside Orca-managed terminals, orca always resolves to the Orca CLI on every platform. In any other shell on Linux, use orca-ide wherever this file says orca — outside Orca's terminals, bare orca on Linux is usually the GNOME Orca screen reader (/usr/bin/orca), and running it starts speech on the user's machine.

Dev builds (pnpm dev): after pnpm build:cli, the dev CLI is exposed as orca-dev (the global shim points at this checkout's wrapper + out/cli). Inside a dev Orca's terminals use orca-dev emulator ... (or ./config/scripts/orca-dev.mjs emulator ... for worktree-local invocation that does not depend on the /usr/local/bin symlink). Plain orca targets any installed production Orca. The app's own agent preambles use orca-dev automatically in dev mode.

Use plain shell tools when Orca state does not matter.

Start Here

Choose the executable once for the current session:

• If the ORCA_CLI_COMMAND environment variable is set, use its value. Orca exports this for managed WSL sessions.
• Otherwise, in a dev checkout whose session exposes ORCA_DEV_REPO_ROOT, use orca-dev.
• Otherwise, on Linux outside an Orca-managed terminal, use orca-ide. Never use bare orca there because it normally resolves to the GNOME screen reader.
• Otherwise, use orca.