Living in Vim

John, some tips for your new life with Vim (welcome!)

• "hide the most of the Debian changelog" can be toggled while already in Vim by typing "zi" (without quotes) in command mode. To turn it off completely add "set nofoldenable" to your ~/.vimrc. Have a look at ":help folding" for more info on the folding subject

• to turn off/on autoindent/highlighting/... the commands to be set are "set autoindent" vs "set noautoindent" and "syntax on" vs "syntax off". You can achieve global settings (no matter which file) putting them in ~/.vimrc or you can achieve per-filetype settings putting then in ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/FILETYPE.vim, where FILETYPE stands for the file type you're interested in. To check which is the FILETYPE name, just edit in Vim the file you like and have a look at the output of ":set ft"

• for editing a file without closing the one you're using (the Emacs "buffer" concept) do "set hidden" in your ~/.vimrc (briefly commented in /etc/vim/vimrc in the default Debian package). Have a look at ":help buffers" for more info

• to integrate with Mercurial and Darcs I've no ready solution, there is the VCSCommand plugin in vim-scripts but out of the box it only works with CVS/SVN. Try looking in the scripts section of Vim.org

Hope this helps,