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by pinzlert 4084 days ago
I've been using Vim for about 2 years now, mostly because I can't figure out how to exit it. ;)
3 comments

Isn't that one of the formative Unix moments for every newbie: some program throws you into vi and you have no idea how to get out.

It's like getting your head stuffed into a toilet bowl at a boys' boarding school. Afterwards, you feel like part of the gang.

When I was new with SSH and everything, I managed to enter vim on my session on a server I was managing. Didn't manage to exit. So quit the SSH session and logged back in, still in vim, what to do? Well, I logged in as another user and rebooted the server. Not my proudest moment.
Well, it does tell you how to exit if you press ctrl+c...
Emacs is the same: when you don’t know it you can’t guess you have to type ^X^C to exit it.
Most people use the X client for Emacs, so you can just close the window in most cases.
Back at my first job, since it was a fairly infrequent occurrence, I would occasionally ask my boss how to get out of vim. He would laugh and enter some new convoluted command every time!
Oh, boy, I laughed.
Hah, at least it's not ed.

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.hup

I liked ed because I could see what I was writing when I was done editing. I could also see what I was looking at when I opened the editor.

These two things were worth the other inconveniences of ed, IMO, until I discovered automatic tiling window managers...

Ed is pretty useful the moment you have to search and edit some giant file that will make Emacs vomit.
Just close PuTTy. That's what we were doing at school.