Have you got your PATH set up correctly? See: Problems with PATH

I made the change you described; it didn't avoid the problem. (Pandoc is properly installed and in my path.)

One thing that does suggest that it might be a path issue of some sort: if I do $ atom foo.md it works fine.

I don't know if this is relevant: I have the same problem on Ubuntu 14.04. So it's not just an OS X quirk.

I had the same problem, with the same error message as above. To fix it you have to:

 vi `which atom`

Add "env" before this line:

open -a "$ATOM_PATH/$ATOM_APP_NAME" -n --args --executed-from="$(pwd)" --pid=$$ --path-environment="$PATH" "$@"

Like so:

env open -a "$ATOM_PATH/$ATOM_APP_NAME" -n --args --executed-from="$(pwd)" --pid=$$ --path-environment="$PATH" "$@"

Then call atom from the command line. I have yet to make it work by calling atom from spotlight

I also tried editing /etc/launchd.conf, adding in setenv PATH /Applications/Atom.app to the file and reloading everything with grep -E "^setenv" /etc/launchd.conf | xargs -t -L 1 launchctl, but that only gave me this error instead:

'pandoc' could not be spawned. Is it installed and on your path? If so please open an issue on the package spawning the process.

I've got the same issue. Will work when I run atom from command line, but not launch as an icon/explorer. I've added "env" and that didn't fix it. Any updates of things to try out?

I'm afraid not. This is a more general issue with Atom (and Sublime) and Macs, unfortunately.

I have the same problem, on OS X – even though PATH is set up as indicated:

open -a "$ATOM_PATH/$ATOM_APP_NAME" -n --args --executed-from="$(pwd)" --pid=$$ --path-environment="$PATH" "$@"

Starting Atom from CLI works just fine, oddly.