>Electron is the cross-platform application shell we originally built for the Atom editor to handle the Chromium/Node.js event loop integration and native APIs.

>Electron is the cross-platform application shell we originally built for the Atom editor to handle the Chromium/Node.js event loop integration and native APIs. Sounds pretty straightforward to me. They created APIs for Node.js to allow people to make cross-platform applications, such as Atom (a text editor).