custom category loop?

Is there a way to loop through all the categories for my side bar manually without WP_get_cat()? What I need to do is echo out all the categories but I need it to be formated like this:

<li><span>[category count]</span><a href="[category link]">[category name]</a></li>

How can I do this?

I’m thinking if I can get an array of all the category IDs and then loop through them echoing out the count, permalink and name for each…