Honestly just pony up for CLion. It is actively developed (support for makefiles and arbitrary build systems was just added in addition to the existing CMake) and JetBrains has a super reasonable subscription that lets you keep the last version you had indefinitely if you ever cancel.

Yeah, CLion is just superior to any other C++ IDE out there.

I’ve tried to like the JetBrains stuff (especially Clion) but I just have never gotten to the point where I love it.

I've found that to really get the most value out of Jet rains IDEa you have to go out of your way to discover the built-in features and use them, things like the built-in debugger, git support, find in project, search by symbol, etc. There's a LOT in there and easy to ignore or gloss over.

A way to learn is to take the time to read the tip of the day and try out the suggestion right away. Don't disable the tip of the day. It only takes one minute a day and after about a month you'll have learned a lot.

That's probably because VS for mac is not really "VS" but a re-skinned Xamarin IDE

If you can get used to some oddities, Xcode works well enough for any C++ code you write yourself, or have enough control over to make sure you follow the conventions it expects.

But if you need CMake support within your IDE, CLion's worth it, just get the JetBrains subscription (student or professional) and don't look back. Oddly enough when I last used it, CLion didn't work with Clang-based projects quite as nicely as Xcode (it preferred GCC) but that might have changed since then.

Finally, if you want to support open source, you can try VS Code. It mostly works, but it's not an IDE.

Eclipse CDT also exists, but ... I think the last time I tried eclipse was back in the mid-2000s before RubyMine when there was a Ruby-on-Rails plugin for Eclipse. I haven't looked back since...

Clang and LLDB work fine now