Comment by Izkata

Others have mentioned relativenumber, but for horizontal I just use search. For example:

   This is a line of text.

If the cursor is on "is" and you want to delete everything before "text", this is what I do:

   d/text<enter>

Any movement works for these actions, even searching to "select" everything between the cursor and the target. Often I'll use visual mode to get a quick confirmation before deleting it:

   v/text<enter>h
   (check selection is what I want)
   d

The visual mode one isn't exactly the same because one additional character, the first "t" in "text", is in the visual selection area, hence the "h" to go back one.