>>Last time I tried I couldn't bind F-keys for some reason
F keys bind fine for me, using OS X Terminal, and gnome-shell in linux. Are you using an esoteric term?
>> I couldn't get syntastic's error marking column to stay on instead of shifting my text back and forth all the time
That is using the SignColumn part of vim. As far as I know, vim doesn't allow you to force the existance of SignColumn. You can open up a bug report at their Google Code repo if you think its worthwhile
There are a number of vim-setups that are popular. janus (https://github.com/carlhuda/janus), spf13 (https://github.com/spf13/spf13-vim) are pretty popular ones.
>>Last time I tried I couldn't bind F-keys for some reason F keys bind fine for me, using OS X Terminal, and gnome-shell in linux. Are you using an esoteric term?
>> I couldn't get syntastic's error marking column to stay on instead of shifting my text back and forth all the time That is using the SignColumn part of vim. As far as I know, vim doesn't allow you to force the existance of SignColumn. You can open up a bug report at their Google Code repo if you think its worthwhile
>> I couldn't get auto-complete mapped to tab properly Depending on your language, YouCompleteMe (https://github.com/Valloric/YouCompleteMe) is amazing, but if you don't do C based stuff NeoComplCache is great too (http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2620)
>> the extra functionality of vim ends up being counter-productive when none of it works right To be fair, thats true of any tool.