Why not gt and gT? All the commiting/greping/chmoding/building stuff can be done from within Vim. You don't really need to get out of it unless you want to launch a curses program or an interactive SSH session. Eck, even in such cases I think it's way better to have multiple terminal windows or panes.
It's mostly habit for me not using gt and gT. I only learned :tabnext and :tabprev when I learned of tabs at some point, and the mappings followed shortly after. I have a lot of other \whatever bindings too. (Such as \gt that's mapped to :tab split<CR>:exec("tag ".expand("<cword>"))<CR>)
And yeah, you can do every shell action in vim with things like :make and so on and :! when a nice wrapper isn't pre-made, but at that point it starts to feels a little too emacs-y for me in a lot of places and again, frequently I ctrl+z for things orthogonal to what I was working on. Sometimes I do use those wrappers, of course, but it's unnatural in many cases and I think it's of questionable utility compared to mastering the command line normally or compared to other vim features. Linux is my IDE, vim is my editor. I like to have them work together instead of one dominating the other.
