text editor with easy, versatile, macros?

I still have on my system an OLD DOS text editor named VDE ((Video Display Editor). I have to go into dosemu to use it, but it is so versatile, and powerful that I often do it, especially when I have some extensive text editing to do, (for instance to copy a long email, and then reformat each paragraph so that the text will flow smoothly into ,lets say , LibreOffice Writer.

A glowing but inadequate description can be found here: http://sites.google.com/site/vdeeditor/Home/about-vde

I read that VDE has been rewritten and renamed for Linux. There are two names given: SUE (Simple Unix Editor), or UDE (I suppose that stands for Unix Display Editor). I even found a place to download it with it's source (supposedly). But I can't get it to work for me. I have never compiled anything in Linux, and can't seem to find a truly simple set of instructions for doing so. All the tutorials I find on the subject assume that you know something about it first - which I don't.

What I'd really like to find is that someone else has already recompiled it for Debian and I can just download it and use it. If not, then where can I find a simple tutorial for compiling it here under Mint10? And by simple, I mean with examples, showing syntax. I would also need to know what packages I need to get to be able to do it.