P.S. I would like to know if someone spots mistakes or suggest enhancements, thanks :-)
I don't mean to be rude but to me this folder is just a collection of your configuration files. What I really want to know is what your configuration is, what changes have you made to make your environment usable and useful to you?
It took (still takes) a lot of time to learn Vim. At first I used it as notepad with syntax-highlighting with auto-indent. That is, I immediately entered insert-mode and kept in there for as long as I could. But slowly I've started to learn myself how to truly use Vim. Nowadays I try and exit insert mode as quickly as possible (sometimes after typing just one or two letters).
Every once in a while I stop and reflect on things I do very often, look up ways to do them faster and then try and train those ways to be a habit. I learned most of these things from Bram Moolenaar's presentation "Seven habits of effective editing" (http://www.moolenaar.net/habits.pdf and http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2538831956647446078) most of this talk probably holds for emacs too.
Examples: when I need to rewrite a function arguments nowadays I just type "ci(" which does Change Inner parenthesis, it deletes all text between the enclosing parenthesis and puts me in insert mode to start typing. If I need to move more then 5 lines down I use incremental search instead of arrows/hjkl to move around. If I need to move to the end of a line I use $ (goto end of line) or A (append after end of line). If I need to go to the middle I'll use other shortcuts.
Vim has billions of ways to move around and select text for editing. Learning to use those relevant to your way of working is crucial if you want Vim effectively instead of annoying form of non-modal editor.
As for making Vim useful to you, I don't think anyone can tell you how to do this. You need to make it fit your style of working. Which means, trying, figuring out what bothers you and steal what works from others. Most of these example .vimrc's that people post do not include comments on what the options do, which makes this hard. I commented mine but it is rather sparse and I don't have a place to dump it at the moment to show you, unfortunately.
I've been using vim for not that long (but long enough that it's now my main editor). What all shortcuts exist for getting to the middle of a line?
I would be curious to know if there are other shortcuts for doing this too though.
Alternatively you can use the search commands, '/' (forward search) or '?' (backwards search) with the text at the middle of the line as your search string.
[Edit: here's a nice cheatsheet of them: http://www.digilife.be/quickreferences/qrc/vim%20quick%20ref... ]
When I'm editing string parameters of a function I'm calling, I use di' / di" a lot (moves to first ' / ", deletes inside content, and drops to insert mode).
As I learned vim, I learned to appreciate its simplicity and now keep my config at the minimum possible deviation from default as I can tolerate. My .vimrc is fairly spartan (http://github.com/tomhsx/homedir/blob/master/.vimrc) and the only plugins I use are ctags, pyflakes, and shortcuts for F6/F7/F8 to debug/execute python scripts.
I posted that link as a suggestion to browse the relevant parts (.vim/ and vimrc) as they are the result of a Vim newbie quest through several content on the Internet describing how to get some of the most requested features from IDEs (for example, intelligent completion) working with Vim.
As you might see from my .vim/bundle, I use relatively few plugins; they are pretty standard things like a file browser (NERD Tree), except for the custom "plugin manager", Pathogen, that I found as a reliable alternative to Vimballs and the like.