It rather sounds like you want THE's 'all' command: http://hessling-editor.sourceforge.net/doc/comm/ALL.html
I think the view expressed on this list in the past is something like: see :h :global I am not claiming this is a complete response. Indeed, I believe your request interacts with another request for anonymous marks. Anonymous marks would be unnamed but could be jumped to successively. Anonymous marks could be set just as you suggest: by pattern matching commands. Edits could then be restricted to marked our unmarked lines (along the line of :g and :v). They could also be the basis of folding. If you make a feature request, you might put it in this context. Cheers, Alan Isaac
