I have had chocolat installed for a long time and I sometimes use it when I don't want to look at a file in vim, which is pretty often when I just want to read the code. I hang out in the #chocolat channel on Freenode. My take on it is the developer sincerely cares about making a great editor, and it has always been pretty simple to use. The economics of being yet another code editor are not great and Alex is the only owner and developer yet he is still dedicated to the project. I am not sure you will ever see the kind of ecosystem that TextMate and Sublime Text enjoy, but if you can see past its faults, chocolat is a pretty nice little editor.
I started using it shortly after I outgrew Coda. I went to Textmate at first, but it was around the time that Textmate seemed totally dead. Its interface reeked of 2004 but Chocolat was quite modern. I liked it a lot but I was eventually lured away by Sublime's ecosystem. Then I got sick of dealing with JSON for my settings and checked out Atom. But I find that I'm not really taking all those rich ecosystems that Sublime and Atom offer. It's probably time for me to take another look at Chocolat as well.
I'm a huge fan personally, I especially like it's implementation of combined gutter linting and git line diffs.
I love Chocolat. It's fast. Code completion is excellent. It picks up where Textmate left off and uses the same bundles/plugins. And it doesn't require a bunch of customization to make it look at home on my Mac. I periodically fire up Sublime and Atom for fun, but Chocolat is most comfortable for me.