Vim: From Essentials to Mastery

NerdTree is hard to use. Other editors I've used (TextMate, IntelliJ, RubyMine) have a simple "project drawer" that doesn't think it's a text buffer. That doesn't accidentally get replaced with the contents of a file or accidentally closed. What am I missing here?

Project-wide find and replace isn't nice. Vim is great at single file replacements, but it's not clear to me how to do a project-wide search that's anywhere near as productive as RubyMine. In RubyMine you can view a dialog of all the candidate replacements and selectively include/exclude. You can quickly hop between search results and fly through the code. You can preserve case, which does the replacement in a case insensitive way without turning upper case to lower case and vice versa.

I can't find a way of running focused Rspecs that I like. I just want to put the cursor inside a spec or describe block, hit a key, and then pop up a terminal at the bottom of the screen where I see the output of the spec runner. I don't want a quickfix buffer... because if there are stack traces that seems to obscure them. I tried to roll something together with ConqueTerm but it insisted on moving my cursor into the spec output buffer, which slowed me down.

The language plugins aren't syntax aware. In RubyMine I can hit ctrl-w to expand the selection to the next node of the syntax tree. This is incredibly useful for quickly selecting arbitrary regions of code. I know text-objects can get you some of the way there, but they force you to choose a specific type of region, rather than just progressively selecting higher nodes on the syntax tree.

Finally, moving by word doesn't respect camelCase or underscore word boundaries. Maybe this can be fixed?

I don't mind the learning curve. I like a lot of the concepts that Vim brings to the table. But I just can't get past these issues. I know I may be able to learn Vimscript and fix all these things, but so far it hasn't seemed worth it.