After some more research, I think Colemak (http://colemak.com/) is going to be a better alternative. The bottom row stays the nearly the same, which means that a lot of the common application shortcut keys remain the same. It's also based on more modern, computer-assisted research into English word frequencies. One cool idea it uses is to change Caps Lock to Backspace.

I'm still worried about vim, though. One nice side effect of my planned switch to Colemak is that I now have a legitimate reason to put off learning Emacs. After my switch to Colemak is complete, I'll try to tackle SLIME.