When it comes to LaTex I decide the environment (OS / LaTeX distro) by which editor is supported. So far I still find 'Kile' the best editor by far. Which is why I have a Kubuntu VM just for that purpose. For the templates that I use there's a whole host of packages that I need - and the package names of course don't match in apt-get and in LaTex, so it basically becomes a 'guess what error message means which package is missing / try to google for all that' until everything runs. I don't know about you, but I don't call that smooth.
Personally, I just get everything. That is, I'd get the whole MacTeX distribution. Never need to worry too much then. (At least on Ubuntu, the stuff from apt-get is often years old, which doesn't matter sometimes, but does matter often enough to be annoying, in my experience.)
FWIW I like texworks and texstudio for "Visual" editing due to the side-by-side display of LaTeX and PDF (and using SyncTeX to jump between them).
Other than that I mostly use Vim to edit LaTeX.
I think texstudio is fairly similar to Kile you might want to give it a shot.
