Vim buffers are great. For me the best thing is that you can go to any buffer by ":b some-unique-part-of-the-file-path". If I'm switching between a ruby file

Vim buffers are great. For me the best thing is that you can go to any buffer by ":b some-unique-part-of-the-file-path". If I'm switching between a ruby file and its spec file (tests), usually I'll just have to type ":b spec" to get there. Usually I'll have 2 open windows and will just be jumping to specific buffers all the time. I like this kind of workflow because I have poor vision and selecting from a list of files, or a list of buffers is a really painful operation for me. Instead, I'm just thinking "What do I want to work on?" and type in part of the file name/path. If I forget, I can look at the list of open buffers, but it almost never happens. One other thing I make great use of is ctags and vimgrep (just remember to use noautocmd with vimgrep so that it doesn't take a million years to parse all the files). Once I've got my working set up buffers for a problem, then it's just bouncing around inside them.