How do I exit the Vim editor?

Question

I\'m stuck and cannot escape. It says:

\"type :quit to quit VIM\"

But when I type that it simply appears in the object body.

Answer 1

This is for the worst-case scenario of exiting Vim if you just want out, have no idea what you've done and you don't care what will happen to the files you opened.

Ctrl-cEnterEnterviEnterCtrl-\Ctrl-n:qa!Enter

This should get you out most of the time.

Some interesting cases where you need something like this:

• iCtrl-ovg (you enter insert mode, then visual mode and then operator pending mode)

• QappendEnter

• iCtrl-ogQCtrl-r=Ctrl-k (thanks to porges for this case)

• :set insertmode (this is a case when Ctrl-\Ctrl-n returns you to normal mode)

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Edit: This answer was corrected due to cases above. It used to be:

EscEscEsc:qa!Enter

However, that doesn't work if you have entered Ex mode. In that case you would need to do:

viEnter:qa!Enter

So a complete command for "I don't want to know what I've done and I don't want to save anything, I just want out now!" would be

viEnterEscEscEsc:qa!Enter