Smultron : The Next Generation

I've been obsessed with programmer's editors lately. I think what set me off was the latest BBEdit upgrade; a paid update lacking any must-have features is an incentive to survey the competition. I'm not going to list them all, but suffice it to say that I looked at pretty much every editor that will run on OS X, whether Cocoa, Java, terminal, or X11-based. In the end found that what I wanted most was something that: 1) had that nice native feel and 2) was open source, increasing the odds that it would stick around, get updated, and remain affordable. It needn't have the featureset of Eclipse or XCode.

The application I liked most that met those criteria was Smultron. It's impressively full featured for a 1.0, one-person effort. It's got syntax coloring, regular expression support, a novel one-window interface to multiple documents, user-extensible syntax coloring, multiple (human) language support, a nifty "code snippets" drawer, HTML preview, and lots more. It reminds me a bit of SciTE, but alas there is no Aqua version of SciTE.

Smultron is licensed under the GPL. I've exchanged some mail with Smultron's author, and while he's made it clear that he would like to retain his own Smultron branch, he would welcome a "competing" fork based on his code.

I've been playing with the source in XCode and have succeeded in fixing a couple cosmetic problems, writing a quick hack to work around a hanging bug, and even adding a feature that I wanted ("Run in Shell").

I'd like to fire up a Sourceforge project for this, but I can't possibly do it alone. Though I'm learning, my Cocoa skills at this point are not at a very high level. So I'm looking for other developers who would be interested in taking the Smultron codebase and collectively running with it. There are bugs to quash, features to add, and interface guidelines to uphold. If you're interested, email me. I'll set up a discussion list and we'll figure out whether this is worth doing, then move on to the gritty details.