Answer by Jim Dennis on Stack Overflow question: what is your most productive shortcut?
You mention cutting with yy and complain that you almost never want to cut
whole lines. In fact programmers, editing source code, very often want to work
on whole lines, ranges of lines and blocks of code. However, yy is only one
of many way to yank text into the anonymous copy buffer (or "register" as it's
called in vi).