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.
