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Skills stablyai orca

orca-emulator

Use it when:
You work in Orca and an iOS change needs checking on a simulator, or the agent must use an app there.
It does:
Attaches a simulator to your worktree, then taps, types, swipes, presses buttons and rotates through Orca's emulator commands, finding targets in the accessibility tree.
You get:
A device the agent drives while you watch it live in Orca's emulator pane.
Needs:
Orca on a Mac with the Xcode Command Line Tools, and the app already built and installed with xcodebuild or simctl.
Unlike orca-emulator-android:
That one drives Android devices over adb and can also install apps, grant permissions and read logcat.

Needs Orca, Stably's desktop app for running coding agents in parallel, on a Mac with the Xcode Command Line Tools.

TL;DR

Orca is Stably's desktop app for running many coding agents in parallel. The SKILL.md is a short stub: it picks the right Orca executable, warning that on Linux a bare orca command outside Orca's terminals usually starts the GNOME screen reader, then loads the guide that matches the installed Orca version. That guide maps each goal to an orca emulator command: list devices and sessions, attach a simulator and make it active for the worktree, tap, gesture, type, press home or the side button, rotate, read the accessibility tree, pass any other command straight to serve-sim, the simulator tool Orca wraps, and stop the helper or shut the simulator down. Coordinates run from 0 to 1 from the top left, so the agent taps an element at its frame's center, and typing is ASCII only. It tells the agent to stop the helper when done, since it holds the device until Orca quits, and how to get input working again when Xcode's Device Hub blocks it.

Summarizes the skill at 555bd48.

npx skills add https://github.com/stablyai/orca --skill orca-emulator

skills.sh pageSource on GitHubAll skills from stablyai/orca

Total Downloads
6,100 on skills.sh, Nov 9, 2026
Repo stars
119,480 stablyai/orca
First seen
Jun 13, 2026 on skills.sh
Weekly Downloads
123
-74% over the 8 weeks to Nov 9
Weekly values
Week toInstalls
Sep 21476
Sep 28479
Oct 5522
Oct 12295
Oct 19556
Oct 26704
Nov 2189
Nov 9123
Category
category:debuggingcategory:computer-usecategory:software-engineering

Find root causes, review code and test what you built.

Drive desktop apps, phones and simulators: tap, type, read the screen and test native apps.

Everything for building software: planning, coding, debugging, design, frameworks, cloud, agents and skills.
Type
type:tool

Operates a CLI, API, app or bundled script to get something done.
Effect
effect:local

Its own steps create or change files, git state or local tools.
Needs
needs:cli

A specific command-line tool or desktop app must be installed, such as gh, agent-browser, LibreOffice, Obsidian or a vendor CLI.
Publisher
by:official

A verified publisher on skills.sh, or the company or maintainer behind the product the skill operates.
Topics
mobiletestingcomputer-use
Stack
stack:orca

SKILL.md

From stablyai/orca at 555bd48. Checked daily, last changed Nov 7, 2026.

Frontmatter
name: orca-emulator
description: >-
  iOS Simulator control from inside Orca, with the live device view in Orca's
  emulator pane. Use when driving a booted Apple Simulator on macOS: taps,
  gestures, typing, hardware buttons, rotation, and the accessibility tree, or
  when an iOS change needs simulator evidence. For an Android device or emulator
  use the Android emulator skill; build and install the app with xcodebuild or
  simctl first.
license: Apache-2.0

Orca Emulator

This discovery stub loads the version-matched guide from the Orca executable used for this session.

Prefer Orca over raw serve-sim or direct simctl for simulator control inside Orca; it handles device scoping, helper lifecycle, and worktree context.

Resolve the CLI for this session

Choose the executable once and reuse it for every later command:

  • 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 run bare orca there — outside Orca's terminals it normally resolves to the GNOME Orca screen reader (/usr/bin/orca) and starts speech on the user's machine.
  • Otherwise, use orca.

Below, ORCA is a placeholder for the executable you resolved. Substitute it before running anything; do not create a shell variable or run ORCA literally. This works the same way in POSIX shells, PowerShell, and cmd.exe.

If the selected executable cannot run, report its exact error and stop. Do not fall through to another executable, which could silently target a different Orca build.

Load the version-matched guide before running Orca commands

ORCA skills get orca-emulator

Prefer --json. Use the selected executable's --help for commands or flags the guide does not cover. If a command reports that Orca is not running, start it with ORCA open --json and retry. If it fails with runtime_access_denied, your sandbox blocked the connection: re-run it with escalated permissions, and do not run ORCA open or restart Orca. If skills get is unknown, explain that updating Orca restores the guide; use --help for read-only discovery and do not guess unsupported commands.