Quick Tip: Open Atom Projects Faster on OS X (Command Line)

I really love GitHub's Atom editor, but it can be really slow when it comes to opening project folders with the atom command. I want to share an alternative command that accomplishes the same thing but a lot faster.

The normal way:

atom MyProjectFolder

The alternative "fast" way:

open -a /Applications/Atom.app MyProjectFolder

The alternative approach can't do as much as the atom command, but for this use case it's a lot faster. However, it's a lot more to type so let's create an alias for it:

atm () {
    open -a /Applications/Atom.app $1
}

Now you can simply type:

atm MyProjectFolder

Voila! It's not only faster, but actually one character shorter.