Programming

I've been an Emacs user for many years, though of course I know some vi and vim commands out of necessity.

I want to try taking the plunge by spending a month using vim only, no Emacs.

Sadly the vim documentation isn't very helpful for me in a number of areas. I'm hoping someone can point me to some resources or recipes that will help with:

• Turning off that stupid "hide most of the Debian changelog" thing. I have no idea why it does that or how to make it stop.
• Turn on or off autoindent, syntax highlighting, etc. in various languages (really, I want to set global defaults for all of them)
• Be able to edit another file without closing or saving the first (:e doesn't seem to do what I want)
• Integrate it with Mercurial and Darcs