How to exit Vim

By Flavio Copes

Learn how to finally exit Vim: press escape, then type :wq to write and quit, or :q! to quit without saving your changes. No more getting stuck.

Want to save your changes and exit? Press the esc key, then type :wq, which means write and quit.

Want to exit without saving changes? Press the esc key, then type :q!

Don’t feel bad, you’re not alone in not knowing how to exit Vim,, and if you search Twitter you’ll see all sorts of memes and funny tweets:

• “How do you generate a random string? Put a first year Computer Science student in Vim and ask them to save and exit.”
• “One does not simply exit Vim”
• “Nobody knows how to exit Vim”
• “I’ve been using Vim for a long time now, mainly because I can’t figure out how to exit”

It also looks to be one (if not the one) most popular question on Stack Overflow.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Vim. I don’t love it, it’s just a tool. I usually use VS Code for day to day writing and coding, but I sometimes use it.

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