Navigation in vi

After some difficulties I had with my c++ IDE I decided to switch to
using vi. I have a lot to learn, but already I'm really impressed by
the possibilities of navigation. It offers so much more than the
standard arrow keys and page up/page down/home/end keys in a standard
IDE:
- you can mark a point in the code and go to it
- ctrl I and O allow you to navigate back and forth
- / and f allow you to find
- w and b move you back and forth across words and with numbers you
can navigate across multiple words
- you can fold parts of the code and navigate across the folds
- it's integrated fully with the shell itself, so you can open up a
new window with ctrl+w, and execute whatever commands you want.
-I'm sure there's lots more, this is just from a first glance what
struck me as far superior to navigation I see in most editors.

There are still difficulties I'm trying to get over, like navigating
across multiple files and autocompletion, but I think I'm definitely
on the right track in switching to vi from an IDE like Eclipse or
Netbeans.
Eclipse works well for java, but when I tried using it for C++, I
got so frustrated with it, despite the fancy graphical interface, I
wanted an editor with good code navigation. In fact, oddly enough, the
fact that most IDE's have a graphical interfaces actually causes more
problems. Whereas in VI, a few keystrokes can get you to where you
want (granted there's a learning curve), in an IDE, there's a dialog
that pops up, you're restricted to the buttons and textboxes they give
you, plus there's the extra GUI load time. And it's the customization
feature of vi that makes it really powerful. You can make the
shortcuts you want, and it's all self-contained within a single
.vimrc. There's no digging through Eclipse plugin configuration files.
If anyone can point me to good tutorials for using VIM as an
effective IDE (for C++ specifically), I would greatly appreciate it.
There's so many subtle things about VIM I really don't know where to
go to learn more about using it effectively.

Thanks,
Ven

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