You can do selection first in Vim by using visual mode. For this particular example (5dd) you would want to use visual line mode by pressing shift-v. Then you c

You can do selection first in Vim by using visual mode. For this particular example (5dd) you would want to use visual line mode by pressing shift-v. Then you can select the lines you wish to cut, and press d to delete them, or apply any other action to that block of text. I frequently use c (change) on my visual selections, type in new code at the point where it was removed, then use p to paste the old code somewhere else.