I didn't try building it from source, so I didn't know about any difficulties in doing so. I agree that that is a serious issue. In particular I wonder if patch

I didn't try building it from source, so I didn't know about any difficulties in doing so. I agree that that is a serious issue. In particular I wonder if patching Scintilla and Lua is really necessary... About opening files and navigating buffers: I must have been a very naive Emacs user because I didn't really miss anything basic. I open files by typing the file name, with tab completion. I switch to buffers in two ways: if I have only 2 or 3 buffers, I advance between them; if I have more, I jump between them by typing portions of their their names. To navigate inside a buffer all I use are motions by character, word, line, paragraph, page; jumping to matching parenthesis, bracket or brace; incremental search; jumping to line numbers. All of this is present in Textadept, so I felt the basics were covered. (I am sure that more expert Emacs users will definitely find lots to miss in Textadept.) Indenting of course is much more primitive in Textadept, that's definitely true. I'm used to indenting manually (well, not totally manually: having each newline start with the indentation of the previous one and then adding or removing indentation using tab and S-tab), from using other non-Emacs editors and esoteric languages for which no Emacs mode had been written at the time, so I didn't mind that much. The first thing I really missed was eval-last-sexp, so I quickly wrote a basic substitute (since Lua doesn't have those easy to match parenthesis around everything, I evaluate either the selection or, if empty, the whole line; that works for me). I have the Lua code evaluated in an environment where the usual print function inserts text in the buffer instead of writing to stdout.