VimMate - TextMate like editor for Linux

I've been looking for ways to speed up Rails development with vim. So, after installing rails.vim, allml.vim and surround.vim things got faster. When coding, I'm using vim's buffer splitting extensively. This way I can see multiple files all at once. What I was missing was tabs.

I have 24" screen but still, sometimes this is not enough. It was not uncommon for me to have 10 or more buffers on the screen. Usually I work with up to four, which is still bearable, but anything more is really painful to work with. So I wanted tabs, like seen in TextMate. And of course, vim has tabs (did you doubt this?).

Just after I've got tabs working I found VimMate. Go figure. VimMate is TextMate clone, works on Linux and has all the power of vim plus some of TextMate. Killer combo. Compared to pure vim, VimMate feels a bit slow, but hey, what'd you expect from GUI app?

Things I'm missing in VimMate (or still have to find it):

• keyboard tab switching
• keyboard shortcuts to file searchfield on the left side
• how to start vimmate with non-default color scheme
• how to get console window to show
  

Combined with a few .vim modules (rails.vim, allml.vim and surround.vim) gives me a quite nice speedup in my Rails development. Exactly what I was after.