[brudgers]

Sed and Awk are the traditional old school tools for scripting edits of large text files. Perl is a more recent option. And there's nothing wrong with using Python or Ruby or whatever.

On the Emacs versus Vim, Emacs is fatter with features by design. Vim is designed to be lighter weight so it can ship on memory constrained systems by default. The Emacs community tends to have a more substantial interest in scripting and customization and one of its features is built in tooling for writing scripts, e.g. the eLisp REPL.

Good luck.