The open
command is part of OS X and uses Finder's default “Open With…” application to open the file, just like double-clicking it in Finder. $EDITOR
is used for things like fc
where it is used as the default command-line editor (a replacement for vim
or emacs
).
To use Atom with the open
command, you can select a file of the type you want in Finder, press ⌘ command+I
for “Get Info”, and then change “Open With:” to Atom, and click “Change All…”.
Alternatively you can define an alias like
alias e="atom -nw"
in your .bashrc
and then run e file-to-edit.txt
whenever you want to edit a file in Atom.