I've invested a great deal of time getting plugins to work, scripting my own, customizing every aspect of vim but I really wish I listened to the people saying

I've invested a great deal of time getting plugins to work, scripting my own, customizing every aspect of vim but I really wish I listened to the people saying all along that "vim is the text editor, unix is the IDE". Since I started following this advice I haven't looked back. The two main reasons I ignored this advice initially is that I was mainly on windows and that vim has some great windowing abilities. I knew about cygwin as an answer to the first but I didn't know about tmux previously, perhaps I didn't need to know because vim already had a similar feature set. Nowadays my vim setup is almost as minimal as yours.