Well, I imagine a lot of it's following started during the OS <= 9 days, when things like vi or emacs weren't really available. It also served as a replacement for things like grep and sed which weren't available at the time. I'd imagine that for many people it's the interface - you can accomplish a ton of things that are doable with command line tools but that most people don't know how to do. Here are some of the things I find really useful:
Effortless & transparent handling & switching of line endings.
Powerful HTML tools
Shell "worksheets" (allows easy editing & running of shell commands)
Multi-file regular expression find & replace functionality, with nameable saveable expressions
Transparent FTP/SFTP support
Easy scriptability and integration with command line tools
And don't forget ...
multi-file diff, with side-by-side highlighting (integrated with CVS, too).
en-tabbing, de-tabbing
re-wrapping text
inserting, removing line prefixes/suffixes
... to name just a few more. I'm sure many/most of these things are easily doable by someone who's mastered vi or emacs, but it's the learning curve that's kept me from ever doing that.
Ray
