I used vim for a development IDE and customized extensively. These days, I've had to relearn stock vim, since I tend to log onto many corporate servers that aren't guaranteed to have my environment/plugins/settings. Also, the state of C++ syntax/symbol parsing wasn't where I needed it to be. Maybe it's gotten better?

I've found Nerdtree to be most indispensable. Other good ones are pathogen, ctrlp, a.vim, and vim-gitgutter