By garish-looking do you mean with the default white background and awful looking buttons?

I installed the Doom Emacs configuration and it looks really great and modern on macOS. I think you'd like it! Definitely worth a quick install to see what is possible - you can always go and make your own configuration based on that if you want

Doom Emacs: https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs

Doom Emacs themes: https://github.com/hlissner/emacs-doom-themes (can be installed standalone but not sure if they disable the toolbars etc)

It absolutely is possible to get Emacs on macOS looking super minimal with no toolbars. Here's mine, for example:

https://imgur.com/a/om7exnP

I toned down my original comment, but that looks much better than the default installation.

Is that just the default installation with better choices in the settings? I should have been more patient Emacs and persistent in configuring it.

I used a few packages to get me there (though some of it can be done through configuration, it was just easier that way). The relevant bits in my config are:

- better-defaults (removes the toolbars/etc): https://github.com/technomancy/better-defaults

- doom-modeline (a nicer-looking modeline - that's the bar at the bottom): https://github.com/seagle0128/doom-modeline

- base16-chalk theme from base16-theme

All of the above packages are in MELPA.

And then the transparent titlebar is:

    (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(ns-transparent-titlebar . t))
    (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(ns-appearance . dark))

can you get to a Darwin shell? i think my wife runs emacs there from the cmd line, which is much calmer.

On a similar note, I have found on Linux that just switching to a virtual terminal and running Emacs in text mode is an absolutely wonderful way of achieving deep focus without distractions. Obviously not much use if you need a web browser on your second monitor though.

Have you tried spacemacs yet?