how can I hotkey it to run my perl straight from the editor

My bad. I thought Smultron had this functionality, but my memory was obviously playing tricks on me. Sorry.

(Since it is open source you could always write a patch of course :-)

TextWrangler (currently my default OS X editor) definitely does allow this. The "Run" option of the "#!" menu can be bound to a hotkey using the "Set menu keys" option of the "TextWrangler" menu.