Vim hall of honour
vim.org
vim.org
When I worked in C, I used vim.
When I wrote shell scripts, I used vim.
When I worked in Python, I used vim.
When I came back to using Perl after many years away from it, I used vim.
When I kept notes at conferences, I used vim.
When I wrote my first book, I used vim.
When I built my first (second, third, and dozenth) website, I used vim.
I can think of very few pieces of software that have stuck with me consistently through all those years. Linux, Apache, BIND, bash, the gnu core tools (grep, sed, etc.)...that's pretty much it. Nearly everything else has changed, sometimes several times.
Google Web Cache:
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8LEimV...
Quoting in case the overaggressive title changer happens to stop by: Vim is certainly worth more than 100 euro (vim.org)
Buying it for a 100 euros? Yes, in a heartbeat. It's the single most important tool I use.
I don't agree with the "hype" part. Where's the hype? I use vim because it gets the job done.
And because it's available everywhere I guess. Without such wide availability (that's what "hype" probably refers to), I don't think it would have been so popular.
I switched to vim about a month ago and am more productive now than I ever was before. I'd fight to keep vim in my toolkit. Modal editing, jump commands, chained actions, macros, tiling, windowing and configurability are just a few of the features I would miss if I had to switch back.
Non-vimmers: Don't get blinded by the hype, vim rocks for practical reasons.
So while it's unlikely Vim would ever sell, then or now, for 100 euros, VIM is worth that much both then and now. Discovering the VIM text editing features today for the first time is just as impressive as discovering them 20 years ago.
The only thing I'd say is that viEmu for Visual Studio is lacking in several areas, but the access to VS's Intellisense makes up for it. And that's of course not an issue with vim as much as viEmu.
The unity in keybindings between my home coding environment and my work coding environment means there's very little cognitive dissonance--my muscle memory does all the work. People who don't spend their time equally split on vastly platforms probably don't understand just how huge of a godsend a cross-platform editor is (Emacs/Sublime have this too--not meaning to suggest there aren't other editors that have this).
If you were curious.
The monetary value of a copy of free / open source software is effectively zero, provided that at least some people are distributing it without restrictions and free of charge such that it is readily available.
The consumer surplus is the excess value the buyer receives. Think "I would have paid €5 for that drink right now, but they only charged me €2!"
The producer surplus is how much more someone paid than the producer was willing to sell it for.
The same thing can be worth different amounts to different people. Airlines in particular are good at price discrimination: trying to extract as high a price as possible, capturing the possible consumer surplus. Universities too.
Lots of things get no-haggle prices that ignore this difference between price and value.
I guess I always thought that the value (or worth - these are the same, right?) of something in an efficient market is its last sale price, and because vim is widely available for free it's an efficient market with a last sale price of zero.
I would agree with, "The value / worth you derive from your use of vim is greater than 100 euro, assuming you actively use at least one of your vim installations." But then again you could say something similar about most common free or nearly free tools and consumables, for example cutlery, oxygen, and linux.
But the point is that you've found an equilibrium in the system with the current price, current suppliers, and current customers. There are customers would would have happily paid more. There are people who WOULD have bought the good if it cost less, but it doesn't so they didn't. There are people who are happily supplying it and making mad bank. There are people who are supplying it and making a razor-thin margin. There are people who WOULD supply it if the available price were higher, so they're not supplying it right now. The price is an efficient equilibrium point, but it's not the global arbiter of value.
To come back to the original topic at hand, I believe many Vim users value Vim at well over 100 euros. Worth usually refers to value rather than price and this why I believe some people down voted you although you were technically right that Vim's price is 0. Water is not worthless although it is free, etc.
I'm not an economist but that's how I understand it.
Just a tiny nitpick... ;)