Curl vs. Wget
For my usage:<p>* Wget's the interactive, end-user tool, and my go-to if I just need to download a file.  For that purpose, its defaults are more sane, its command line usage is more straightforward, its documentation is better-organized, and it can continue incomplete downloads, which curl can't.<p>* Curl's the developer tool--  it's what I'd use if I were building a shell script that needed to download.  The command line tool is more unix-y by default (outputs to stdout) and it's more flexible in terms of options.  It's also present by default on more systems--  of note, OSX ships curl but <i>not</i> wget out of the box.  Its backing library (libcurl) is also pretty nifty, but not really relevant to this comparison.<p>This doesn't really need to be an "emacs vs. vim" or "tabs vs. spaces"-type dichotomy:  wget and curl do different things well and there's no reason why both shouldn't coexist in one's workflow.