the emacs text editor is probably the oldest, most complete and most complex text editor for the console. its been ported to almost all popular consumer operating systems, and offers plugins, especially when intergrated with the melpa project, that extend functionality that rivals visual studio, sans graphical drag and drop of controls, or widgets, etc

emacs has been in ciruclation on the internet since the early days of freebsd, and is considered a world class text editor for unix. i believe richard stallman created emacs, and when you fire up emacs on a graphical display, such as x11 or quartz, it shows a friendly, double pane (well, theyre called windows) introduction screen with an image embedded in the top window

yes! this text editor allows images in the text buffer, and if you full screen it, you can create new windows with C-x (control, THEN x) and pressing 1 after the keys have been sequentially pressed

with the company and flycheck package, you can have auto complete and syntax checking, much like xcode and visual studio, at a severe cost. c works fine, but c++ is very buggy and slow in some instances.

you can compile directly from emacs. however, i suspect some foolery in the scripts and possibly in some distributions, and forks, that the emacs client may be bugged, or even have a root kit, but thats just a suspicion of a unix text client with networking features

anyways, with emacs28, since ive had trouble compiling emacs30 on macos, be sure to

1. have all dependencies installed
2. issue a ./configure command
3. issue a make command
4. and above all, do a make install in the root directory of the source code (ie tar xfv emacs.tar.gz && cd emacs && ./configure && make && make install)

on the macos platform, it should compile a cocoa native binary i think, and create an emacs.app program, which can be dragged into the Applications folder

i believe its in the nextstep directory, but a find . | grep app command should pin point the location of the file

from my experience on macos, emacs has rarely crashed, but certain versions create a binary for macos that does not execute, which is a little scary; could be gatekeeper, or could be some tomfoolery

unidef