About Crimson Editor

The story

Crimson Editor began in 1999 as a small, fast source-code editor for Windows. I wanted an editor that loaded instantly and stayed small — small enough to fit on a single floppy disk — while still being genuinely useful for real programming work. From 1999 to 2005 I kept adding features, and it grew through the 2.x and 3.x versions up to 3.72.

Around 2005, life changed. We had two children, and between raising them and a busy day job as a working developer, I no longer had time to keep developing it. So I released the source code, hoping someone would pick it up and carry it forward.

Emerald Editor

For a while, someone did. The project was continued under the name Emerald Editor, though that effort didn't last long. The people who worked on that successor are credited on its SourceForge page: sourceforge.net/projects/emeraldeditor.

Coming back (2026)

Years passed. Now, with retirement on the horizon, Crimson Editor came back to mind. I remembered how much fun it was to build, and it felt like too much of a waste to simply leave it abandoned. So I returned to it — modernizing the original source for 64-bit Windows and Visual Studio 2026, and planning new features once again.

With more than twenty years of development experience behind me, I believe I can make it a safe and fast editor. But more than anything, I hope to give something back to people who want to build an editor of their own — a guide, drawn from the real code of one that has been used for decades.

Credits

• Ingyu Kang — original author and current maintainer.
• The Emerald Editor contributors — arantor, pn8830, and ryanm101, who carried the project forward; see the SourceForge page.
• Syntax-language contributors — many users contributed syntax definitions over the years; see Supported Languages.
• Henry Spencer's regular-expression library; Inno Setup by Jordan Russell.

License

Crimson Editor is free software under the MIT License. Source, releases, and issues live at github.com/igkang00/CrimsonEditor.

Support

If Crimson Editor has been useful to you, please consider sponsoring its development — it directly helps keep the project going. Thank you.