I once put a lot of work in building the "perfect" .vimrc. I used it ever since with only local minor changes because style / persistent swap / compatibility reasons...

Nothing special. Use buffers as tabs and switch tabs with H/L is the most essential feature for me. I mostly use gvim.

    set path=.,/usr/include,,**,
    set sw=4
    set ts=4
    set expandtab
    set ignorecase
    set smartcase

  set background=dark