I love Dwarf Fortress and play it quite actively. I've been using Vim as my primary IDE for many years. That said, I wouldn't compare Dwarf Fortress to Vim.
Vim is mainly difficult to get into because the model itself is so different from what people are used to and there's inherent complexity. But, quirks aside, it's mostly very consistent and learning a few patterns will get you very far.
In Dwarf Fortress you need to fight not only incredible complexity, but also so very much bad UI/UX and inconsistencies between what should have been identical actions. A great example is searching a list of items. This is done with q for query. Or sometimes s for search. And in some cases f for filter. Or even better, the way k, v, t, q, are all just needles variants of "look at thing under cursor". And none of them work for some activity zones such as pastures, then you need i.
As much as I love DF I'm very much looking forward to the Steam version, mainly for the UI overhaul, which is so far looking really promising.
Vim is mainly difficult to get into because the model itself is so different from what people are used to and there's inherent complexity. But, quirks aside, it's mostly very consistent and learning a few patterns will get you very far.
In Dwarf Fortress you need to fight not only incredible complexity, but also so very much bad UI/UX and inconsistencies between what should have been identical actions. A great example is searching a list of items. This is done with q for query. Or sometimes s for search. And in some cases f for filter. Or even better, the way k, v, t, q, are all just needles variants of "look at thing under cursor". And none of them work for some activity zones such as pastures, then you need i.
As much as I love DF I'm very much looking forward to the Steam version, mainly for the UI overhaul, which is so far looking really promising.