I download oh-my-zsh(or the fork Prezto), pick a theme, tweak 1-3 settings, load my custom PATH, and I'm in excellent shape. I have a shell that works great with little work.
Similarly with vim, I don't know most of the whizbang vim command combinations and don't use it much outside of short console edits, but gvim with its syntax highlighting + splits(created and selected with a mouse) + lots of plugins (mostly installed with pathogen):minibuffexplorer + ctags + tagbar is a fairly useful combination without much custom configuration.
