Struggling to configure Atom for AE scripting on Mac

[USCG Heartland]

I am following a video tutorial series on AE scripting. I've downloaded Atom and installed the process-palette package to allow me to run AE scripts from the editor. The command that I was told to use was:

osascript -e 'tell application "Adobe After Effects CC 2020" to activate' -e 'tell application "Adobe After Effects CC 2020" to DoScriptFile "{fileAbsPath}"'

But whenever I try to run a script, I get the following error: 

Executed : osascript -e 'tell application "Adobe After Effects CC 2020" to activate' -e 'tell application "Adobe After Effects CC 2020" to DoScriptFile "/Users/d8mac4/Desktop/Online Adobe Training/lower third practice/test.jsx"'

Returned with code 1

122:123: syntax error: Expected end of line, etc. but found “"”. (-2741)

I'm clueless as to what I need to fix or troubleshoot. I'm able to easily AE scripts from Visual Studio, but I can't even get a "hello world" alert to run from Atom.

 

[Mathias Moehl · Accepted solution]

Hi,

are you following my scripting classes at fxpdh? 🙂

To be honest, I don't recommend using Atom anymore. Adobe discontinued ExtendScript toolkit, which was back then the only way to debug Ae scripts. In the meantime, Adobe developed an extension for VS Code that allows debugging directly in VS code. VS Code is similar to Atom, but has this big advantage that it can debug Ae scripts. This is crucial, in particular since the old ExtendScript Toolkit does not work on Mac OS Catalina or newer. So I highly recommend to use VS Code instead of Atom.

After installing VS Code, make sure to install this plugin
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Adobe.extendscript-debug

[USCG Heartland]

Ah yes, I am following your class! 

I actually started using VS Code when I took the Motion Design School scripting class, and then tried switching to Atom when I started yours. But I'll go back to using VS Code 🙂

[Mathias Moehl]

oh, good, then you already know VS Code.

It is a bit of a pity that Adobe had no plans with VS Code, yet, when I recorded the fxphd course. Otherwise I had done the course with VS Code of course. But I guess it is a very good thing that there is a lot of new development going on in the scripting world and inevitably this has the side effect that some things get a little outdated...