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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T22:16:56+00:00

I’ve thought that mate is virtually the same as ‘open -a TextMate.app’, but I

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I’ve thought that mate is virtually the same as ‘open -a TextMate.app’, but I guess I’m wrong in this.

As when I run the following command, when there’s no hello2.txt, I get this error.

open -a TextMate.app hello2.txt
The file /Users/smcho/hello2.txt does not exist.

But, it’s OK to run mate.

mate hello.txt --> opens the text mate.

What’s the difference between the two?

I even tried 

open -a TextMate.app --args hello2.txt

But this time, TextMate run with the file name ‘Untitled’, not ‘hello2.txt’.

And this code opens the ‘hello3.txt’ without any problem.

[NSTask launchedTaskWithLaunchPath:@"/Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/MacOS/TextMate"     arguments:[NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"hello3.txt", nil]];
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    open will open the given file with the default or a specific application.

    open -a TextMate.app hello2.txt

    means “Open the file hello2.txt using the application TextMate.app”.
    If there is no hello2.txt, there’s nothing open could open, with or without TextMate.app, hence the error.

    open -a TextMate.app --args hello2.txt

    means “open nothing specific in the application TextMate.app (i.e. only open TextMate.app) and pass ‘hello2.txt’ as additional argument”. This is a different kind of argument than the first example. TextMate.app can decide what to do with that additional argument. Apparently it chooses to ignore it.

    mate is a utility optionally installed by TextMate.

    mate hello.txt

    means “I’d like to edit a file called hello.txt in TextMate”, which is exactly what TextMate will let you do. It’s a different utility with different behavior and different purpose, and it seems to better suite what you want it to do.

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