VIM is a great instrument for programmer. It's fast, stable, has a lot functionality. But there is one thing you should know before you start: VIM is extremely shortcut oriented text-editor.
I was a fan of jEdit, but it is very unstable. A lot of plugins are crashing time after time. So I decided to find something else. IDE's like NetBeans and Eclipse are very slow. I've used Emacs and it was interesting. But it wasn't mine. That's why I've tried VIM.
I'm using it about 6 month and I can say, that my happiness is growing day after day.
Plugins, that you have to try:
rails - awesame plugin for Ruby on Rails
matchit - aotocomplete html tags with "Cntrl"+ "Shift" + "_"
autotag - quick updating ctags file after each file write
that's all :)
VIM has all you need out of box. When I'm saying "all you need", I don't mean "all you want" or "all you expected from VIM". There is a VIM Way. It's quite differ from IDE.
Here is my config ~/.vimrc:
