I'm just gonna take this as a reminder that I'm probably due to drop a few more dollars in the bucket. I've contributed $250 over the 15 years I've been using vim, which puts me comfortably in the hall of honour...but that's still not a lot of money for what is, arguably, the most important piece of software I use. $16.67 per year...that's a bargain.
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.
It's a nice surprise to see tpope as one of the top donators. What he has contributed to the vim community through his plugins was already worth much more than that IMHO.
Agreed, I was surprised as well. I would imagine that the number of people he has helped entice to the vim world exceed his contributions by quite a bit.
Right after the tightly thought out keybindings, I think the greatest value offering in vim is the documentation. It's extremely comprehensive, and being fairly conversant in Vimscript I know I could develop plugins without internet at all, looking up the API with :help (I've only recently acquired the habit and it feels great.) So if vim came out with such a mature, thorough documentation, it would not only be well worth the 100 euro, but I think it would have little problem finding at least a cult following out of thin air. Writing those docs are arguably as hard as writing vim itself, perhaps harder because it isn't as challenging and requires pure dilligence and thoroughness. It's like writing a full book to ship along with the software.
id suspect VIM would have a very hard time if it was coming out now and nobody knew about it, even for free. That doesnt mean its not awesome, but VIM is all about its legacy, huge ecosystem and hype.
I've heard the "hype" about vim for years, sometimes from people who clearly (in retrospect) didn't understand what made vim so good. It was not a selling point for me!
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.
VIM clearly is the most hyped editor nowadays by the hardcore tech circle and imo that plays a big role in its popularity. It has a few runner ups like emacs and Sublime etc, and before it textmate was the tool to use. Of course VIM has been popular for a long time, but only in recent years i see all these high quality resources to learning VIM cropping up and its alot more visible than it was a few years ago.
I also use vim because it gets the job done, but I completely agree with parent: Vims present day success is due in part to it having a massive culture of advocacy. It's hard to attract new users without hype.
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.
The question is not how much you can sell it for, the question is about how valuable it would or could be.
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.
I work in corporate where there is no admin access to my work machine and we're expected to use Notepad for small tasks and Word for big ones. The windows version of Gvim gives me all the familiar keybindings I have on my Linux box at home, with features my coworkers can't get in their editors (I use sed several times a day--what a lifesaver).
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).
I use gVim on Windows and MacVim on OSX and while I'm no uber power user, I think they do the job very nicely. I've never really missed much on either platform in terms of capability.
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.
Gvim on windows is an easy way to get a tool that will do search, regex replacement, quick text editing macros, etc. All you need is to run executable (gvim.exe), there is no need to install, so from a copy of gvim.exe on a usb drive, dropbox, or whatever, (and by memorizing your favorite vim settings!) you can do some pretty advanced text editing that surpasses whatever is available in a stock windows install.
Seamless integration into a Unix terminal environment is one of vim's biggest advantages. As an example, the ubiquitous plugin syntastic provides syntax checking for several dozen languages by simply passing your source through the respective command line interpreter and piping the error response back into vim.
> Vim is certainly worth more than 100 euro (original title)
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.
Look into producer and consumer surplus. In any exchange, you'll tend to find that the value of the items exchanged are worth more to the receiving party than the giving party. It's practically essential to agreeing to a trade.
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.
So you're saying that this person was implying that even though the price is 0 euro, the consumer surplus is greater than 100 euro? I can understand this reasoning, so thanks for explaining it. I'm not sure I believe that consumer surplus can be measured outside of controlled psychology experiments, since it's only speculation and talk is cheap.
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.
I think the efficiency of markets is based around marginal costs and benefits, not absolute costs and benefits. The cost of goods are set by looking at the intersection of the people willing and able to supply the good, and the set of people willing to pay for the good. See, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand
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.
I understand when it comes to something that is normally bought and sold, but I guess it changes for me when it comes to something that is normally given away for free and never sold, except as part of a larger system such as OS X or enterprise Linux.
First, value is relative. To my grand mother, Vim has no value. Second, it is true that the price in an efficient market tends to approach the value most consumers will get out of the product (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand). That being said, the value a consumer assigns to a product is always superior to the actual price he is paying, otherwise, why would he bother with the transaction at all? Hence the consumer surplus.
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.
It still falls free from the sky. People make claims on it after that point. How extreme these claims can get only shows how different price and value are.
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.