Recently I discovered what may be the best find yet on my path to enlightenment with vim, ctags. This nugget is amazing! It works with an impressive list of languages, of which Ruby and Erlang can be found. With Ubuntu it can be installed simply with

sudo apt-get install exuberant-ctags

From the working directory of your project the command “ctags -R” will index all the source files found in your project and put them in a file called “tags”. For this reason I added “/ctags” to my git global ignore file found here. Once the ctags file is created you can start up vim, and with your cursor under any language constant you can press “ctrl+]” and will jump to the file:line were it is defined.