If you want to use that blindly, there's just 3 things to configure.
Set BINFILE and CFGFILE at the top, then in the line
Code:
all: clean obj/editor.o
list all the object files you want compiled together. For instance, if you have foo.asm and bar.asm in your src directory, the line would be
Code:
all: clean obj/foo.o obj/bar.o
and it will compile and link those files together.
The basics of Makefiles are pretty simple. As far as all the crazy punctuation goes, I'm not an expert in that. I read the docs as needed to make them work in the general case, and it works across all the projects I have.
When I have small things that can fit in a single .asm file, I sometimes do grab a single-command assembler like xa. But it is good to have a proper ca65 project skeleton that you can do bigger, more flexible development in.
If you're just banging around with small stuff and aren't familiar with Makefiles and segment-based configuration, yeah you might want to go for something simpler than ca65. It takes a fair amount to set up, but it's the only thing I'd want to use for large projects. I simply run smaller projects through the same, since it's good future-proofing for scaling something up later.