"Once a programmer enters Vim, it is difficult to escape." This sounds like a horror story, but it actually happens to programmers. The question on how to exit Vim on Stack Overflow has hundreds of hits. Thousands of times.
The original question is:
I'm stuck and cannot escape. It says:
"type :quit<Enter> to quit VIM"
But when I type that it simply appears in the object body.
You may think, "I have been using Vim for a long time. I think Vim is very easy to use and there is no need to exit!" However, users do not feel the need to exit and Vim cannot exit. The discussion on Vim exit issues can be traced back to 2014. .
In 2014, the famous foreign Reddit website asked questions about this:
Q: How do you generate a random string?
A: Put a Windows user in front of vi, and tell them to exit
In 2015, the problem of Vim quitting was like a snowball, and programmers received more and more feedback. Some programmers even said: "I have been using Vim for two years. The main reason is not that it is powerful, but because I don't know how to use it." Know how to quit.”
In the past year, the question of how to exit the Vim editor accounted for 0.005% of Stack Overflow question traffic. This means that for every 20,000 questions on Stack Overflow, one of them was about how to exit the Vim editor. , if calculated according to Stack Overflow, then 80 people ask for help how to exit Vim every hour.
What's even more interesting is that this question has continued to attract the attention of programmers since it appeared on Stack Overflow. Compared with Stack Overflow, the popularity of "How to exit Vim" seems to be even greater on the Internet. According to Google Trends, the popularity of Vim exit has been growing since 2004. This occurred before Stack Overflow raised the issue of Vim exit. The popularity of this issue surged in 2010, showing a linear growth trend.
Stack Overflow data also revealed some very interesting things. For example, the tags commonly used by programmers can actually be more inclined to classify the technologies they use. For example, JavaScript engineers and web engineers usually work in C#, Android, ios, PHP, Java, etc. tabs stay, and programmers who stay in Vim tend to pay more attention to IDEs, such as Visual Studio, Eclipse, Xcode, etc.
To put it bluntly, Vim is not only a prison (making it easy for programmers to get in and difficult to get out), but also a trap. It allows programmers to fall into the trap through links or other methods. Once in, it is difficult to get out.
Now if you search Google for "how to exit Vim", you will usually get the following reply. If you are currently in Insert and Append mode, you can press Esc to exit. Or enter ":q!" to exit, but it only exits the editor and cannot save the modifications.