Common escape characters

\a	Beep
\b	Backspace
\c	"Control" character. \cD = CTRL-D
\e	Escape
\f	Form feed
\l	Make the next letter lowercase
\n	New line, return.
\r	Carriage return.
\t	Tab.
\u	Make the next letter uppercase
\x	Enables hex numbers
\v	Vertical tab

A morning of building

I am a university student.
And my computer department's software policy is terrible.
For one, their VIM was not compiled with GNU support.
So you are stuck with a fairly awkward terminal VIM.
I mean, of course, VIM is supposed to be all keyboard-rocking and everything but...
...isn't is nice to sometimes just grab those code lines with a mouse select?
Anyways, I set out on a quest for getting gVIM working on my account.
Certainly, I do not have sudo permissions, so I had to get the source.
Ok, now what? I have never built anything outside of an IDE before.
make?, was it?
Alright,

cd vim73/src
make
#big, scary, make log here
./vim -g

Awesome!
But as soon as I try to turn on syntax highlighting, I notice that everything is not this great.
I do not have write access to the /usr/bin.
After a few minutes of searching I ended up doing this:

./configure --prefix=$HOME/vim/
make install
#bigger, scarier, make install log here
cd ~/vim/bin/vim -g

Essentially, you tell make install to install everything in the prefix directory.
$HOME is the home directory environmental variable of course.
To be cool, I have also edited by shell startup file (.bash_profile for bash).

alias vim='$HOME/vim/bin/vim'
alias gvim='$HOME/vim/bin/vim -g'

Let the magic begin!