Right, the line number is mostly just my habit. Occasionally I'll just yank with a regex, ie: y/<regex>, but that usually requires stopping to think.
I guess my point is there are a lot of ways to do things in vim, and even just learning a couple of them is in general quite powerful. Additionally, being able to use regex's with commands is very useful, and something not readily apparent if you aren't much of a regex user.
The line number thing is generally a search to first line (line number is in the ruler at the bottom of my vim window), search forward to last line, execute command. I suppose this is actually an ed-compatible command, older than vi.
I guess my point is there are a lot of ways to do things in vim, and even just learning a couple of them is in general quite powerful. Additionally, being able to use regex's with commands is very useful, and something not readily apparent if you aren't much of a regex user.
The line number thing is generally a search to first line (line number is in the ruler at the bottom of my vim window), search forward to last line, execute command. I suppose this is actually an ed-compatible command, older than vi.