In Vim, what is the best way to select, delete, or comment out large portions of multi-screen text?

Question

Selecting a large amount of text that extends over many screens in an IDE like Eclipse is fairly easy since you can use the mouse, but what is the best way to e.g. select and de

Answer 1

My usual method for commenting out 40 lines would be to put the cursor on the first line and enter the command:

:.,+40s/^/# /

(For here thru 40 lines forward, substitute start-of-line with hash, space) Seems a bit longer than some other methods suggested, but I like to do things with the keyboard instead of the mouse.