[jaequery]

you can still do ctrl-p ctrl-n to go up and down. but these are a bit limited.

it is a little painful when you have to do many minor text changes in quick succession.

and ultimately, this is what made me just go straight to emacs and i have not looked back since.

emacs may take some use to getting started, esp if you are on osx (rebind command as meta) but it gives you the best of both worlds. the choices are unlimited and you get to program your own editor you want it to be.

[sevensor]

Repeating the previous command (.) handles most of the cases where I would do multiple small edits. Search and replace (especially with backreferences, \zs and \ze) handles most of the rest, and macros handle pathological cases. There's almost never a call for doing multiple small edits by hand.