Prerequisites
The instructions bellow are executed under cygwin, but it's not a requirement, you can also build atom-shell under Windows's console or other terminals.
The building of atom-shell is done entirely with command line scripts, so you can use any editor you like to develop atom-shell, but it also means you can not use Visual Studio for the development. Support of building with Visual Studio will come in future.
Note: Even though Visual Studio is not used for building, it's still required because we need the build toolchains it provided.
Getting the code
$ git clone https://github.com/atom/atom-shell.git
Bootstrapping
The bootstrap script will download all necessary build dependencies and create build project files. Notice that we're using ninja to build atom-shell so there is no Visual Studio project generated.
$ cd atom-shell
$ python script/bootstrap.py
Building
Build both Release and Debug targets:
$ python script/build.py
You can also only build the Debug target:
$ python script/build.py -c Debug
After building is done, you can find atom.exe under out\Debug.
Tests
$ python script/test.py