atom-shell-starter is a base application that you can use to get started writing your own cross-platform (Win/Mac/Linux) Desktop apps via Atom Shell. This template is extracted from the Atom source code, cleaned up to be more generic, and to be a great starting point for a production app.
Everything in Atom Shell Starter is configured via the package.json file - there are some extra fields that are of interest:
name- The name for your app that will be used in the build tools. Make it something simple.productName- The name of your product - your executable will be called this (i.e. "MyApp.app")
The default project is called EightOhEight (get it? Cause it's a sample(r)).
Once you've set that up, do:
script/bootstrap- Run this once per checkout.script/build- Run this whenever you change package.json or change early startup codescript/run- Run the app. Use this for running the app in developer mode
Another useful script is script/grunt, which will run the local version of Grunt. script/grunt --help will tell you the list of available tasks.
JavaScript ES6 / ESNext is available via the Babel project for almost all files except for very early in startup. To use it, add 'use babel'; to the top of your file. Check out https://babeljs.io for more information.
Atom Shell has (at least) two separate contexts - when your app first starts up, it is running in a DOM-less node.js loop - there are no windows. This is called the Browser context. The built-in code proceeds to start up a BrowserWindow object, which then creates a Rendering context, which is what you are more used to - it's got the Chrome DevTools and a DOM, yet it can still use node.js, as well as several Atom Shell APIs that are made available. Check out the documentation for Atom Shell for more about what you can do.
Most of your app's code should ideally live in the Rendering context, because the Browser context is difficult to debug and test - there is no Chrome DevTools, solely printf-based debugging.
Some JavaScript libraries try to detect whether they're in node.js via probing for module or require, and assume that they aren't in a browser. You might find that you need to patch these libraries to always operate in Browser Mode.