anything more comfy than vi, ed or sed is overrated and pure luxury.
EDITOR WARS! YES!!!I mostly edit files in vi or ed, depending on terminal. But, I'm an infidel with an Aquamacs buffer open, especially for editing LaTeX source. The Aarhus university macro package for LaTeX is so good I'm prepared to cheat.
I used to edit the zone file for .SE in FreeBSD nvi. That was painful, and my colleague who was using emacs for same had a considerably easier time, at least opening the file. But, DNS zone files, being line oriented, are much easier with the line paradigm in vi than the region junk in emacs. In the end, we removed the editor step and poked at entries in a database instead, using a Perl program called "chk2000.pl", because it evolved from a very, very ugly shell script called "chk" that I'd written, to check whether name servers were answering properly before delegating.
I'm also, in the spirit of pipelines and jaw-dropping oneliners, quite fond of the in-place editing functions invoked with "sed -i -e" and its Perl equivalent. That's one of the very few places I'm allowing myself a spoon of the GNU syntactical sugar. For most other functions, my finger macros are tuned to 1990s "nvi" or similar.
Finally, I think we all should join in condemning the perversity that is "nano". It's the first thing I'm replacing with "ed" and "nvi" (not "vim", mind you) when I get my hands on a Linux system. The BSD computers, as usual, come with the right set of tools from the start, of course.
Postscript: We should not forget "awk". The things you can do in it. 'mazing. No less.