I agree with a lot of your conclusions, but I think there is a lot of value to be found from nerdtree if you use it correctly.

I'm a super heavy Command-T user as well, but when you are working on a sufficiently large project there is just a lot of value you can gain from being able to see the file tree.

Nerdtree is also my favorite way to rename/move/copy files

I used NerdTree but for those on a Mac there is a pretty interesting Macvim fork (Alloy)[https://github.com/alloy/macvim] that implements a native sidebar.

(Here is a good post)[http://faculty.washington.edu/ivanoats/blog/2012/01/13/makin...] someone wrote about it.

I also like nerdtree when I'm browsing a codebase I'm not familiar with. It's a really nice, easy way to drill down into subfolders without having to do `:e ab[tab]d[tab] ...`

It makes exploring the unfamiliar a lot easier, especially in larger projects, as you mentioned.

I have not heard a good argument to why I should use nerdtree over the built in netrw. Do you have one? Honest question.

"Discover your Vim heroes and periodically check how they have set their editor up. A lot of people publish their dotfiles on GitHub."

Does this actually happen? How does one discover a "Vim hero"? If you guys have any, can you show some examples of who might be a candidate for a Vim hero please?

Yes. I've learned tons from the vim setups of individuals and from some vim "distributions". A rather non-exhaustive list of examples:

Steve Losh's dotfiles: https://bitbucket.org/sjl/dotfiles/src

Drew Neil's dotfiles: https://github.com/nelstrom/dotfiles

Tim Pope's vim plugins (the vim-* repos): https://github.com/tpope

Kana Natsuno's vim plugins (the vim-* repos): https://github.com/kana

spf13-vim distro: https://github.com/spf13/spf13-vim

Janus distro: https://github.com/carlhuda/janus

I don't use any of these "stock" or consider them authoritative -- I've slowly cherry-picked from these and other sources to learn about patterns, plugins, tips, etc. Each source has its biases, implicit and sometimes explicitly documented. Those biases are usually a good thing as they reflect the workflows and customization needs of the authors. I want to learn from these to better tailor my own customizations.

Very good introduction to vim. I like using tabs as well as split windows, though so I do this instead with my motion shortcuts:

  map <C-J> <C-w>w
  map <C-K> <C-W>W
  map <C-H> gT
  map <C-L> gt

The only reason I was able to start with Vim was these videos by Derek Wyatt:

http://www.derekwyatt.org/vim/vim-tutorial-videos/

I use vim for over 10 years now, I think. Every time I read an article like this about vim, I discover new stuff I didn't already know. Like commands or plugins that make my life easier. It's amazing.

> Use Pathogen for managing them.

or Vundle

or NeoBundle

+1 to Vundle. It makes managing your vim plugins so much easier when it comes to updating.