I once helped organize talks at my school, and helped with bringing Richard Stallman to give a talk one time. I was a vim user, but I did a little bit of prep and refreshed my emacs memory etc. So we're setting up the room for the talk, and we're talking a bit, and some people start to arrive. He asks one if they've ever used emacs, she says no, so I said, "we should start an emacs tutorial here, we can teach everyone about things like C-x C-c, and stuff". I just blurted out the only thing I had remembered recently. He turned a cold shoulder to me, I suppose thinking that I had insulted him directly. I ran out to Google what I had said, and then felt terrible about it, but it was too late. That's my remembering how to quit emacs story.

I told the trying to exit vi joke for years until someone pointed out to me that C-x C-c was equally if not more obscure. It was a part of me because that was the first thing I ever learned about Emacs. Just like :wq was the first thing I ever learned about vi.

Now, I think the fact that people seem to have more difficulty exiting vi is because vi is very likely the fallback for $VISUAL/$EDITOR, and hence much more likely to be trapped in by accident when unprepared.

Overall, both are about as hard to deal with. Vim has a better help message, but it's still difficult to find.

* http://jdebp.eu./Humour/exiting-emacs.html

It's too easy to hit accidentally, though. I got burned by it a few times, so I eventually unbound the command. I now use M-x kill-emacs when I want to quit (very rarely, anyway).

Perhaps, exit-emacs or quit-emacs aliases could be defined.

;)

Pretty straightforward.