You can build a macro on the fly to do some transformation for, say, a line of text, or even a function, and just repeat those manipulations. Usually they are crude combinations of vim inputs that work well enough for the situation at hand. Obviously it's not a replacement for IDE refactoring, but if you're using a vim emulator, you can do both

One transform I've done a few times is something where you have a list like this:

foo bar baz

And you need each line transformed into:

[Foo](https://example.com/foo.html)

Or something like that. Macros make short work of it.