You're right, you definitely don't need a dedicated application, but I would rather just open up one executable instead of cobbling together multiple utilities. It's all about your workflow though, for me, I feel more comfortable using a M↓ where scrolling is synced and it can watch what I'm doing in real-time.
I'm gonna look into your setup though. I'm definitely all about being on the terminal, does your setup work well with VIM as well?