Ask HN: How can I make Vim into a useful code editor?

I'm new to Mac and Rails and am going through the tutorials in Agile Web Development w/ Rails. I'm finding that using TextEdit along with switching between files is a bit cumbersome. I'd much rather just stay in terminal the whole time.

I went here (http://code.google.com/p/vimcolorschemetest/) to download a color scheme, placed it in /usr/share/vim/vim72/colors, and ran :colo ansi_blows. I didn't get an error, but nothing changes. Any advice? Thanks!