medit uses autotools for the build. Quick build with default options:

tar xjf medit-x.x.x.tar.bz2
cd medit-x.x.x
./configure
make
make install

This will configure, build, and install medit to /usr/local.

medit requires development packages of the following: gtk2, libxml2, python2, pygtk2.
For example, on Debian you may need to install libgtk2.0-dev, libxml2-dev, python2.7-dev, python-gtk2-dev.

If you checked out a copy of mercurial repository, then do the following to build:

./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-dev-mode
make
make install

Building medit from Mercurial requires the following, in addition to the dependencies
listed above: automake, autoconf, libtool, intltool, docbook, xsltproc, txt2tags.
Other tools may be required and configure may not check for them, please report those
to the author.

To build a python module which could be used in other programs, use
--enable-moo-module --enable-shared --disable-static configure flags in addition
to above.