How To Easily Open A File From Terminal In Coda 2

I’ve been playing a lot more with Coda 2 upon purchasing it since its initial release a couple of weeks ago. While I had been teetering on purchasing version 1 last year, I held off on anticipation of the version 2 release. In the meantime I played with Sublime Text 2.

While I’m certainly no coding ninja I did find Sublime Text 2 a little difficult to undertake all my grasshopper coding stuff. In most cases I found 4 pieces of software open for my workflow:

1. The Sublime Text editor itself (where all the coding action happened)
2. Terminal (where I would interface with the server)
3. Panic’s Transmit (if needed when uploading images, etc.)
4. The browser (to check everything was working)

During this time I wore out my ⌘-Tab keys a lot!

Thankfully, when Coda 2 was released I jumped at the opportunity and bought straight away. All the things I have open in my Sublime Text 2 workflow were now all rolled into one nice neat piece of software.

However, upon using it more I did begin to ask myself the question: How can I open files from the command-line in Terminal and have them opened in Coda 2’s text editor?

For example, if I run the command:

$ coda test.js

I want text.js now opened as a tab in the text editor, and if text.js hasn’t been created or doesn’t exist in the current working folder then create it.

After scouring the internet for a while I stumbled upon Noah Frederick’s shell script code and slightly modified it to allow what I wanted in my Terminal. Here’s what I did to get it to work:

Open up Terminal and navigate to your home directory (generally cd ~ or wherever your .bash_profile file is)

$ cd ~

Edit your .bash_profile file by copying and pasting the code found below – I usually do quick edits in Terminal by using:

$ nano .bash_profile

1. Save your .bash_profile
2. Restart your .bash_profile with the command:

$ source .bash_profile

Test your code by opening a file and then creating a file – hopefully it all works!