Vice is a tiny text editor written in C and Lua. It uses Scintilla as its editor control.
Vim and emacs are really complex - you spend more time fighting them than getting the changes you want. I wanted to have a more nimble text editor.
You'll need to have the gtk header files and libraries (iirc, apt-get install libgtk-dev should install everything) and the lua dev libs (apt-get install liblua50-dev liblualib50-dev).