Suggested setup for an ultra-lightweight text-based programming environment in linux

I am looking for suggestions for a setup for my particular needs. I haven't done much linux since college and want to get back into it as a hobby. I have some not-too-powerful hardware (512 MB ram, single core). I want to do everything via text-based shells and editors, such as vim. My goal is to never touch the mouse. I need the ability to have multiple shells open at once, one running a web server, one running vim, one running my application build pipeline, another one for ad-hoc shell commands such as wget, grepping and untarring, etc. I need to be able to open new shells and switch between shells quickly with the keyboard. But even though I want multiple shells, I do **not** want a graphical desktop environment. I don't ever want to be tempted to use the mouse; part of my purpose is to force myself to learn the command-line way of doing various tasks. I also want to be able to take advantage of my large monitor, running vim with a couple hundred columns dipslayed. Is this possible?