In the same range, I'm rather fond of the filtering feature of vim (actually, I think it's a feature of all "standard" vi's).

If you prefix the ! with a range (i.e. "%" for the whole buffer, or ".,147" for current line thru line 147, or "'a,'b" for marker a thru marker b, etc.), vi will pipe the given range into the external command that follows the bang, and replace it with the output of the same command.

Very useful for one-liners, IMHO. Example: you're editing an SQL file with zillions of INSERT statements, and want to insert a COMMIT every 500 lines, lest the rollback segments chokes under the load:

:%!perl -ple "print 'COMMIT;' unless $.\%500"
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You need to escape the modulo operator, lest vi interpolates into the current buffer name

The down side is that you don't see error messages. Unless maybe you say 2>&1 (haven't tried that yet, though

--bwana147