If you're someone that is coming from Sublime and are used to its features, I'd start with this consolidated plugin repo. It's unmaintained now, but was an excellent primer for me on how to set up the guts of my vim setup.

https://github.com/fatih/subvim

I ended up modifying it pretty drastically over the course of a month. And essentially I think that's why the author stopped maintaining it. Everyone will set up vim their own way. That's kind of the point.

S/he is using https://github.com/scrooloose/nerdtree for the file exploration on the left.

As for switching colors I'd imagine this page would help, though I'll admit I haven't read it: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Switch_color_schemes

I use Tomorrow Night myself: https://github.com/chriskempson/tomorrow-theme

>switch colors

If you have gnome terminal you can use different built in themes and fiddle with the color pallet.

[warning: high-contrast light theme] http://i.imgur.com/tITUU55.png