The really nice thing about query-replace and query-replace-regexp is that you can replace almost all items. It's great for cases where, say, you want to replace all uses of variable "count" while leaving the word alone when it's used in a comment.

If you just want to replace everything, you use the non-query versions, replace-string and replace-regexp. That way, you don't need to hold down the 'y' key.

When I googled to see what the vi "." did, I found this, so the answer is no, but you can download an extension to do it.

But what I was going to say was that there are two options that I can think of:

• If you typed in the command at the M-x or M-: (lisp eval) prompts, you can always just use the command history and rerun the command that way.
• Alternately, you can repeat the next command by typing C-u and the number of repetitions followed by the command. So "C-u 75 -" will draw a row of 75 dashes. You can do more complex things by first recording a keyboard macro ("C-x (", keystrokes, "C-x )" and then prefexing the macro eval command ("C-x e") with a repeat count. If you're afraid of going past a certain point and don't want to carefully figure out exactly how many times to repeat, you can use narrow-to-region first.

Those two things, along with query-replace, automates most of my tasks for me.