There is no doubt that Drush is a magical tool in the Drupal community. Two very useful tools in the Drush "Swiss Army Knife" include drush sql-sync and drush core-rsync. These tools allow copying databases and files between Drupal instances.

If you need to have access to run Drush commands on a production server or via a Drush alias for a production server, policy.drush.inc can help prevent some devastating mistakes. Accidentally overwriting production databases and files can impact you and your clients negatively. The Github gist below shows how the built-in Drush policy functionality can prevent sql-sync and core-rsync from running against any Drupal instance that has a destination with prod in the name. This works for Drush aliases too.

Vim setups can be very personal since there are so many configuration options available. While stock Vim can do much, it doesn't take very long to figure out that you need a plugin manager to quickly access a world of new functionality. Vim plugins can provide integrations, commands, syntax highlighting, and more. Check out VimAwesome to get an idea of what can be accomplished with plugins.

As a long time maintainer of the brewStack project, I have been spending time evaluating better ways to develop Drupal projects locally. Using VM based tools is a huge win because if you mess up a system configuration or setup, you can just throw away the VM and and start over. brewStack has been a great toolset, but you are altering your local Macs setup. Using Vagrant makes that much easier since you don't have to maintain VM snapshots or backups.