[jerhinesmith]

I hate to lead this further off-topic, but I'm trying to get into Vim myself -- how to you approach having multiple files open? Buffers? Tabs? Windows? The netbeans/visual studio/et. al. tabbed approach has always worked well for me, and I'm finding that to be my biggest stumbling block in switching to Vim.

[siddhant]

Try the MiniBufExplorer plugin. It gives you a list of all open files in a different buffer, and you can switch to any of them by just moving into that buffer and pressing enter while on the filename.

[leon_]

I use splits and vertical splits. Tabs are an option too, but I usually don't leave that many files open at once.

For browsing files inside vim I use NERDTree (or if I remember the filename :e <filename>). To quickly open the file's headerfile I use http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=31 - it takes only a :AS to open the file's header file (vice versa) in a new split. (Hint: Map a key to next split/window to switch fast between them. I remapped F1 for this purpose.)

If I really need to have many files open I just open a new tab/window in my terminal emulator. (There are also tabs in vim but I had not a chance to get used to the tab commands yet. gvim/macvim offer more abstract tab support - the tabs are real vim tabs but they are represented as UI tabs. So you can still yank/paste between them but have a more Visual Studio'ish feeling.)