About US

How it all began

Smirne started with a simple frustration. Many code editors are powerful but heavy, crowded with features most people never use. Others are light but fragile, or quietly lose your work when something goes wrong. Smirne was born from the wish for something in between: an editor that opens in an instant, stays out of your way and can be trusted with every line you write.

Rather than assembling it from ready-made components, Smirne has been built from the ground up. At its heart is Lagash, a text-editing engine written specifically for Smirne. It handles everything from syntax highlighting and code folding to the three selection modes. Building our own engine took longer, but it gives us full control over how the editor behaves, and the freedom to take it wherever the project needs to go.

Our philosophy

Free, but not for profit. Smirne is free to download and free to use, at home, at school or at work. We simply ask that nobody sells it or uses it to make money. It is a tool for the people who use it, not a product for someone else to profit from.

Solid foundations first. Before flashy features come the things that really matter: never losing your work, respecting your files and their encoding, noticing when something changes on disk, and bringing back your session exactly as you left it. Every new feature is built on top of this reliability, never at its expense.

Respect for the user. No adverts, no accounts and no sign-ups. Smirne is there to help you write, and nothing else.

Simplicity that grows. Smirne aims to stay clean and easy to use even as it becomes more capable. New features should feel natural, not get in the way.

Built with its community

Smirne is not designed behind closed doors. It grows thanks to the people who use it every day.

Every bug report helps make the editor more reliable. Every suggestion helps decide what comes next. Every piece of feedback, even about the smallest detail, shapes the way Smirne looks, feels and works. The community does not simply use Smirne: it helps build it.

Taking part is easy. You can report a problem directly from inside the application, and share your ideas and wishes with us. What matters to the people using Smirne is what sets its priorities.

Smirne belongs to everyone who wants to use it. That is not a slogan, but the way the project works.

Under the bonnet

For those who like to know how things work:

• Language: C#
• Platform: Windows, .NET Framework 4.8
• User interface: Windows Forms, with custom-drawn controls and themes
• Editing engine: Lagash, developed from scratch for Smirne
• Design: lightweight and responsive, with careful handling of files, encodings and sessions