Can I use CoffeeScript to write my Electron (Atom Shell) application? - coffeescript

Question

Does anything special have to be done to get Electron to run my main.coffee file? I have a main.js file (that works) that I converted to CoffeeScript (hence main.coffee), but when I run Electron main.coffee I get an error like the following:
App threw an error when running [SyntaxError: /Users/foo/develop/electron/main.coffee:13
app.on('window-all-closed', ->
^
Unexpected token >]
I can only assume this is a CoffeeScript issue, since when I commented the offending code with CoffeeScript's block comment (###), I got the following:
App threw an error when running [SyntaxError: /Users/foo/develop/electron/main.coffee:13
###
^
Unexpected token ILLEGAL]
I added coffee-script to my packages.json as a dependency, and made sure it was installed to my local node_modules directory like my other application dependencies, but that didn't seem to help.

Answer 1

I think, the main file main.js has to be javascript. But you can require a coffee file, for example application.coffee, from there using coffee-script.
main.js
// main.js
require('coffee-script').register();
require('./application')
application.coffee
# application.coffee
app = require('app')
BrowserWindow = require('browser-window')
# ...
Installing coffee-script
Include it in your package.json:
{
...
"devDependencies": {
"electron-prebuilt": "^0.33.1",
"coffee-script": "~1.10.0"
}
}
And run:
npm install

Answer 2

I've recently discovered that instead of transpiling to Javascript, you can do something like:
<script>
require('coffee-script').register();
require('../src/app/boot');
and then in src/app/boot.coffee you can use regular CoffeeScript :)
I found it in the app https://github.com/postcasio/hearthdash so there are more examples there.

Answer 3

There is no way to do it (atom doesn't ship with a coffeescript compiler), but you can use the watch option of coffeescript,
-w, --watch watch scripts for changes and rerun commands
For example:
coffee -w main.coffee in your case.