I've used a big, bloated IDE for most of my development career. I am very productive with it, but I've always resented the fact that I am bound to being productive on a single OS and in a small number of languages.

When I took up Ruby development a year ago, my reliance on an IDE was immediately apparent. I use a Mac at home, and so I started working in Textmate and tried RubyMine, but I was still struggling to feel comfortable or fast in any environment other than the aforementioned IDE.

A few weeks ago when I went back to watch several DestroyAllSoftware screencasts on vim, I was (once again) wowed by Gary's proficiency (and efficiency) in vim.

So, I've committed to learning vim to become more productive without the crutch of an expensive tool and to decouple myself from a specific OS. Here's what I've done so far.