And to answer the poster, I tend to just use the default vim. I'm bouncing around machines so much that I don't bother setting anything up on my main one that I'll miss on the others...
Going into an old codebase and just running ':set list' with just the default listchars is maddening enough. The mixes of tabs and whitespace characters is enough to drive one batty. Especially when you find files where someone was using tabs, but with the 'ts=8' or 'ts=2' rather than 'ts=4'.