---
title: "How to open IntelliJ (idea) from the command line on OSX"
date: 2020-06-10T00:00:00+00:00
author: "poornerd"
tags: ["intellij"]
canonical: https://www.poornerd.com/2020/06/10/starting-intellij-command-line-osx.html
source: Raw Markdown twin of the HTML article; content is the original source.
---
I have been using [IntelliJ](https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/) for years, and have seem dozens of live coding sessions at conferences, or online tutorials which start a project with ```idea pom.xml```, but never tried it myself.

![idea pom.xml](/images/posts/idea-shell.png){:class="img-fluid w-100"}

So today, after trying without avail to start a downloaded repo with IntelliJ this way I finally looked into it.

It turns out all you have to do is have IntelliJ install a command line launcher by going to the following menu in IntelliJ:
```
Tools->Create Command-Line Launcher...
```
That it, now you can try thing like:
- ```idea .``` to open the project in the current directory
- ```idea pom.xml``` to import the Maven project