It goes beyond just editing multiple files. I'm a huge fan of tabs in vim so I do a lot of :tabnew filename (which has autocompletion by the way) and mapped \tp and \tn to :tabprevious and:tabnext. I sometimes just open in a new file buffer like emacs does, no tabs and no window splits but when I'm done with the file I go back to the other one.
But I also use ctrl+z frequently, even more when I'm editing over ssh. Usually because I want to do something outside of the editor window not directly related to editing. Or it might be related to editing, it depends, I just want a shell. I may even have forgotten which file contains what I want to edit, so I might back out to a shell and use a find|xargs grep or ack command. Basically any time gedit users open the terminal for something in the middle of editing, I just ctrl+z (or open a new shell tab, but as mentioned ctrl+z is joy on ssh where a new tab means a new connection).
So I use ctrl+z. Also :!bash is stupid, but :r!cmd should be on the page. (It pastes the output of cmd into the file.)
Ctrl-Z to actually suspend vi is fine. (Quick shell commands can be done in vi of course, but sometimes when you need a shell, you really need a shell.) It was the recursive opening of vi I was saying is a bad idea.
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.
But I also use ctrl+z frequently, even more when I'm editing over ssh. Usually because I want to do something outside of the editor window not directly related to editing. Or it might be related to editing, it depends, I just want a shell. I may even have forgotten which file contains what I want to edit, so I might back out to a shell and use a find|xargs grep or ack command. Basically any time gedit users open the terminal for something in the middle of editing, I just ctrl+z (or open a new shell tab, but as mentioned ctrl+z is joy on ssh where a new tab means a new connection).
So I use ctrl+z. Also :!bash is stupid, but :r!cmd should be on the page. (It pastes the output of cmd into the file.)