Summary

This is a request for an option to prevent the Project pane from opening when Atom is used to open a single file.

Motivation

I typically open single files in Atom from the command line, by using the following command:

$ atom <file>.adoc

I do this many times in a day and I jump in and out of different Git projects. I don't use the project features within Atom and prefer to navigate from the CLI and open files in Atom from there. Often I close Atom when I have finished editing a single file.

It seems that recently a change was introduced in Atom that results in the Project pane being open when Atom is started against a single file. The project pane states that "Your project is currently empty". This means that I have to close the project pane every time I open Atom, to be able to view a file in the whole Atom window.

It would be great to have the option to suppress the Project pane on startup, so that I don't have to close it numerous times per day.

Describe alternatives you've considered

1. Using the CTRL+\ keyboard shortcut on Fedora, or CMD+\ on MacOS, to close the pane each time. This is not really a workaround, because I still have to do this many times per day. It is just quicker to do this rather than using the mouse to close the pane each time.

2. Disabling tree-view in Edit -> Preferences -> Packages. This prevents the pane from opening when Atom is used to open a single file. However this is not a suitable long term solution because then the tree-view functionality is not available at all. It would be better to have the option to prevent the pane from opening on startup, but to still have it available to open when you need it.