What bothers me is the retyping. I would like to change the "repeat last command", so that it becomes "insert at the beginning" instead of "insert wherever you happen to be". Here comes the ". register. All I do now, is "u"ndo to remove the text that was wrongly inserted in the middle of the line, hit "I" to start inserting at the beginning of the line, then . (that's Ctrl-R followed by a dot), which inserts whatever I had just inserted with the "i" command, and , of course.