Vim is an extremely powerful text editor, especially for developers. Here, I'll share some of the tips I use working with it on Rails projects. This is not pretended to be a guide about how to use vim, but just to show my most common configuration that I find useful.
Vim is, by default, compatible with vi (the text editor which vim is based in). This is good if you work a lot with both applications because you'll want to have the same experience as user, but the cost of this compatibility is you lose all new features vim supports and vi doesn't. So, since I only use vim, I disable the vi compatibility.