There's the convenience of these tools, then there's convenience of having a small number of non-standard tools to carry along with you, however easy that may b

There's the convenience of these tools, then there's convenience of having a small number of non-standard tools to carry along with you, however easy that may be. For example, for any diff'ing or cat-like need, I find it SUPER handy to just pipe stdout to vim like so: $> thing-with-output-that-needs-navigating | vim - I'm not an Emacs user, but my impression is that over in that world, the shell integrations are crazy good.