Atom Editor Not Opening from Command Line – Fix Guide

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I've been using the Atom editor on my iMac running High Sierra. I usually run it from the terminal by typing atom. I moved many of my apps to an external drive to free up disk space. I originally moved Atom but have since moved it back onto my startup volume.

Sometime during all this I have messed up something and now Atom no longer runs from the command line. I started Atom by double-clicking on the icon. I selected "Install shell command" from the Atom menu.

Previously I did that so I could run atom from the command line. Well, it didn't work this time. How can I tell what that menu option actually does? When I select "Install shell command", what does Atom actually do? And how do I find out what a command does?

If I knew what the Atom command does, I could maybe fix this. Most questions I've read that pertain to this offer alternative ways to run Atom from the command line. I know how to do that, I'm trying to get things back to the way it was before my messing around caused all of this.

Best Answer

Looks to me as though it's running

/Applications/Atom.app/Contents/Resources/app/atom.sh

but you should be able to edit your ~/.bash_config and add the line

alias atom="/Applications/Atom.app/Contents/MacOS/Atom" then re-open terminal and you'll be able to launch atom by typing atom [filename], assuming your copy of Atom is installed in the /Applications folder

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