What about project-wide find and replace? I have been looking to switch to vim, but I do this fairly often and don't see anything that compares to what a good ide can do in vim (without bash command madness).
:bufdo %s/foo/bar/g | update
The Unix shell is pretty much designed for advanced text manipulation across files. E.g., to replace all instances of foo with bar in HTML files, recursively:
$ find . -name '*.html' -exec perl -i -lpe 's/foo/bar/g' {} \;
$ deep replace "foo" "bar" "*.html"