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