"vi – How do I exit Vim?" on stackoverflow viewed +3M times | Hacker News Reader

"vi – How do I exit Vim?" on stackoverflow viewed +3M times

stackoverflow.com

14 pointsvirskyfan13 comments

I waited 10 years for my brother to grow up and ask me the question. Unfortunately he did not ask the question until he took a class in CS that introduced him to vim as a tool. And he did not ask me but searched and got this answer instead.

I had a long tail of memes to share with him ready if he had asked.

"How do I avoid Vim?"- the real question.

sudo apt remove vim

The vim startup screen clearly explains how to exit vim and how to help poor children in Uganda. I don't see the point of this meme. https://i.stack.imgur.com/RjuBp.png

You can just click the link with the questing to realize your comment is not relevant, the confusion isn't with ":q" but with modality

I think about this meme every time I get distracted adding more customization to my vimrc. "How do I quit vim?" I ask myself as I dig deeper down the rabbit hole.

Studies show that vim is harder to quit than heroin or cocaine

You reset the computer and forget about this Linux thing for a year or two is how I answered this question in the nineties.

You barbarian. I used to switch to a different virtual terminal and do "killall vim" like a normal person.

(These days, I can do basic VI mainly because a crappy mini-VI is often the only editor on systems using Busybox...)

Reminds me of the classic joke: “I’ve been using VIM for over 10 years. Mostly because I don’t know how to exit it”.

Blog article from 2017, when the post reached 1M views: https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/05/23/stack-overflow-helping...

My favourite advice for how to quit vim is to run a vim command that someone wrote that calls emacs and asks it to tell the operating system to kill vim's process. I'm sorry that I've lost my link to the details.

Another illustration of how bad defaults can persist forever

Reply on news.ycombinator.com