So I do almost 99% of my development in vim and over the years have setup a basic .vimrc file which has my personal settings. So that I can remember them I have posted my .vimrc file here. The colour scheme is from http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2175. This does presuppose that you are using Linux and have the gnome-terminal installed else just remove the COLORTERM if statements.

set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
set softtabstop=4
set expandtab
set smarttab
set syntax:on
autocmd BufWritePre *.rb :%s/\s\+$//e
if $COLORTERM == 'gnome-terminal'
set term=gnome-256color
colorscheme railscasts
else
colorscheme default
endif

Hope it helps.

Update :

apt-get install ncurses-term

may be required if vi complains and presents an error that  ‘gnome-256color’ is unknown