I'm just starting to get familiar with vim, and I'd like to use it as my primary Rails development tool. As a Visual Studio and RubyMine user, I find a lot of stuff to be missing from the barebones vim installation, and therefore I went ahead and attempted to soup it up with plugins such as:

• rails.vim
• tcomment
• ruby-vim
• NERDtree

and a couple of others. The issue is that I still don't quite get the average work-flow of using vim as one's Rails IDE. In RubyMine (again, similarly to Visual Studio) I have a series of tabs always open, containing the main files I'm switching among, and I additionally use NERDtree to open files from the folder structure. I tried opening them as new tabs, but the tab system in vim is just a lot more awkward than that in real IDEs.

(I haven't seen vim pros in action, but I imagine that they'd not be relying on tabs, but using numerous splits instead, keeping at least a couple of files per split and switching between them with CTRL + ^. Is that the case?)

So, at the end of the day, how do I really squeeze the most from vim if I want to be able to quickly access several files at once?

Thank you!