I feel like you can’t compare these tools without talking about cut. I personally never use awk, but cut and other coreutils can be used together to achieve much of the same

cat
while read -r l; do echo "$l"; done <

cat -e
while read -r l; do echo "$l"$; done <

cat -n
n=0; while read -r l; do n="$((n+1))"; printf '%5d %s\n' "$n" "$l"; done <

cat -b
n=0; while read -r l; do [ -n "$l" ] && n="$((n+1))" && printf '%5d %s' "$n" "$l"; echo; done <

love cat -n, when working with csv files I often use a command like this to figure out which column I need:

head -n1 file.csv | sed 's/,/\n/g' | cat -n

for me it’s grep but i’m amazed how many searching tools there are on Linux. sed, grep, ripgrep, cat, find, walk, sor, locate, awk, etc.

I pretty much always use these commands unless I need regex or something. I think it’s a lot more maintainable by other people since awk and sed have their own unique syntax.