“Open in Atom” Finder Extension

macOS Sierra (10.12) Incompatibility

A combination of sandboxing changes and other bugs makes it impossible for this tool to work. I’ve spent a few hours over the course of several weeks looking for a workaround, including using different NSWorkspace APIs and a few different scripting-based approaches (both using Scripting Bridge and embedded AppleScripts).

Ultimately I decided that this had already taken more time and headaches than it was worth; Finder extensions and sandboxing problems are both independently difficult to debug, and when combined they’re incredibly frustrating to work with.

I think there probably is a solution involving writing an out-of-process service and communicating with it via XPC. After all, TermHere (available on GitHub) makes this work somehow. (I noticed that TermHere has a commit which adds some editor-related preferences, so maybe similar “open in $EDITOR” support will come to that app someday.)

An AppleScript “Open in Atom” Solution

On Sierra and later, I recommend the following solution.

Based on this comment from Nick Vance, the v2.0 products directory contains two products:

A script which you can install and run via FastScripts (this script is not code-signed)
An application which you can command-drag into your Finder toolbar. (this application is code-signed)

These products are also available as the latest release, currently 2.0.

Compatibility

Developed and tested on macOS 10.12.6. (The AppleScript-based products should work with OS X 10.11, too.)

Author & Contributors

This tooling was written by Chris Dzombak.

Nick Vance is a significant contributor to the AppleScript-based products. View other contributors on GitHub.

License

See LICENSE.md.