How to exit Vim

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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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