My single greatest tip to make vim even more amazing is to run it in a tmux session: It makes it super easy to split panes and create new windows for related things you need to do (git stuff, compilation, running tests, running a REPL, etc.)
If you haven't tried multiple panes with multiple font sizes — e.g., smaller font for logs/compiling/long-running, bigger for editing — then that's a world I don't want to live in. (j/k ;)