The devtools of browser window can only debug the scripts of the web pages (e.g. the renderer process), in order to provide a way to debug the scripts of the browser side (e.g. the browser process), atom-shell has provided the --debug and --debug-brk switches.

When this switch is used atom-shell would listen for V8 debugger protocol messages on port, the port is 5858 by default.

Like --debug but pauses the script on the first line.

Note: Atom Shell uses node v0.11.13, which currently doesn't work very well with node-inspector, and the browser process would crash if you inspect the process object under node-inspector's console.

$ node-inspector

You can either start atom-shell with a debug flag like:

$ atom-shell --debug=5858 your/app

or, to pause your script on the first line:

$ atom-shell --debug-brk=5858 your/app

Open http://127.0.0.1:8080/debug?port=5858 in the Chrome browser.