Out of the plugins listed there the most useful ones that actually save me time are CtrlP and Syntastic.
Syntastic is useful because it can give (visual) feedback on exactly which lines have warnings/errors a lot faster than recompiling the project. Also I find it easier to use than :make and :cope.
You can setup CtrlP to take its file list directly from git ls-files: very convenient for working with largish projects where files are in subdirs. And if you press Ctrl-t it opens the file in a new tab instead of replacing the currently open one (YMMV).
Depending on the language(s) you use there are other plugins that might be useful, and you can keep using the terminal as a separate app, and for specific operations (like git commit/grep and such).
In fact for a long time I was launching Vim from a terminal (with tabs), but I found out that I had dozens of Vim processes running in the background by the end of the day.
So I switched to using GVim + separate terminal app now.
Syntastic is useful because it can give (visual) feedback on exactly which lines have warnings/errors a lot faster than recompiling the project. Also I find it easier to use than :make and :cope.
You can setup CtrlP to take its file list directly from git ls-files: very convenient for working with largish projects where files are in subdirs. And if you press Ctrl-t it opens the file in a new tab instead of replacing the currently open one (YMMV).
Depending on the language(s) you use there are other plugins that might be useful, and you can keep using the terminal as a separate app, and for specific operations (like git commit/grep and such). In fact for a long time I was launching Vim from a terminal (with tabs), but I found out that I had dozens of Vim processes running in the background by the end of the day. So I switched to using GVim + separate terminal app now.