The following tips and tricks can be put into your .vimrc file

Remap jj to esc

imap jj <Esc>

Quickly leave edit mode and back to visual mode with jj. This is probably the fastest key combination possible and one of the most frequent key combinations while editing in vim.

Remap semicolon ";"

nnoremap ; :

Instead of shift, semicolon (which produces a colon) just remap the semicolon to a colon while in visual mode.

You can alias commands with vim

command Tab, :tabnew

The only caveat is that your alias must start with a capital letter.

Just finishing up brewing up some fresh ground comments...