[cempaka]

relativenumber is essential too, unless you like typing something like d-638-<Shift>-G just to delete 15 or 20 lines of text.

[jstanley]

I actually think lack of line numbering is essential, because I quite frequently want to select blocks of code with the mouse and yank into the clipboard.

[tambourine_man]

That is true, but you can integrate tmux and vim with the system's clipboard. Then again, :set nu! is easy to type.