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Orbital Orbital

Installation

Requirements

  • Windows 10/11. Orbital is currently Windows-only (ConPTY terminals, taskbar badges, and the installer are all Windows-native).
  • git on your PATH.
  • Your coding agent’s CLI installed and authenticated as usual — Claude Code is fully supported at launch (Codex support is planned), and any interactive CLI runs fine in a plain worktree terminal.

Install the app

  1. Download the latest installer from the GitHub releases page.
  2. Run it. Orbital installs per-user; no admin rights needed.

Auto-update

Packaged builds check GitHub releases in the background. When an update has downloaded, a quiet “Restart to update” pill appears in the title bar — click it whenever convenient. You can also check manually via Help → Check for Updates….

Build from source

Terminal window
git clone https://github.com/jimbuck/orbital
cd orbital
npm install        # postinstall applies a small node-pty patch
npm run rebuild    # compile node-pty + better-sqlite3 against Electron's ABI
npm start          # build the CLI and launch in dev mode

node-pty and better-sqlite3 are native modules, so you’ll need the standard node-gyp prerequisites: MSVC C++ build tools and Python. npm run make produces a Windows installer.