Yep, I'm old. I remember when the Free in Free Software was a philosophical notation (Free as in Freedom). And, the first piece of Free Software that really impressed me back then was GNU EMACS. It is not accurate to refer to Emacs as a text editor. It can be its own environment. Many years ago when I managed a large (for its time) UNIX system at a university, I had a linguistics professor ask me to make GNU Emacs his login shell! He literally lived in Emacs. If you want an Emacs tuned for Mac OS X, take a look at...

Aquamacs: Emacs for Mac OS X