I don't find myself needing Esc very often in Vim. Then again, I do have jk mapped to Esc, and ;; maps to Esc: which is usually why I want to leave insert mode in the first place.

I have Caps Lock mapped to Alt instead, which pairs nicely with various app hotkeys (Alt+T for iTerm2, Alt+E for Sublime, Alt+S for Skype, Alt+Space to pop Alfred, etc), plus the Cmd+Alt+whatever bindings for various things.

Moreover, pressing alt while in insert mode causes the next key to run as if pressed in normal mode. I usually use this instead of escape for those times when I don't want to go into command mode.

One caveat, however. I recently switch to OS X and have yet to figure out how to get alt/option to behave this way. Really my only major gripe about OS X vs. linux.

Related to #7, I use a shell alias to open vim with three splits:

    alias wl="vim -o $HOME/worklog/{todo,progress,done}"

Tasks flow down the splits. If you'd prefer tasks to go left-to-right, use `-O`.

Nice. I am stealing this. I have the leader mapped to <Space>. And I move around splits and tabs using this.

    "New horizontal split
    nmap <leader>s :split<CR>

    "New vertical split
    nmap <leader>v :vsplit<CR>

    "New tab
    nmap <leader>t :tabe<CR>

    "Easy close
    nmap <leader>q :q<CR>

    " Split navigation
    nmap <leader>j <C-W>j
    nmap <leader>k <C-W>k
    nmap <leader>h <C-W>h
    nmap <leader>l <C-W>l

    "Tabs like Vimium 
    noremap <S-j> :tabprevious<CR>
    noremap <S-k> :tabnext<CR>

You should check out `:help CTRL-W_v` and most of `:help opening-window` in general; the first few of your shortcuts are already in Vim by default. I had similar shortcuts until a serendipitous trip into the help docs.

You are right. I used to use them but pressing Ctrl was a pain in the pinky finger. :sp and :vs is 2 more keys to press. Using Space as a leader makes everything available at the flick of my thumb. I rarely ever move my eyes to the command pane.

I forgot to mention that I have mapped Space+P to CtrlP fuzzy finder. That too is a one pinch like operation, even though it requires two keypresses.

Also related to #7, I use Todo txt(http://todotxt.com), and also create an alias to switch to my project folder

   cd ~/my/project/path && todo -+@ ls +project

that will show my TODO list

Give Planleaf a shot for (7). I use it to track everything. Just send an email to [email protected] with a blank subject line and enter your tasks starting with a dash in the body. It will append to a personal todo list. Rinse and repeat. It sends awesome daily digests on all my tasks :)