One out of every 20,000 Stack Overflow visitors is just trying to exit Vim

Parody O'Reilly image credit: The Practical Dev

Vim is a popular keyboard-only code editor originally released in 1991. It is famously difficult to learn, but many developers swear by it — including freeCodeCamp CTO Berkeley Martinez.

Vim is installed on pretty much every Linux- or Unix-based computer, and if you accidentally open it, it's quite difficult to exit.

Stack Overflow just announced that they hit a new milestone: more than 1 million developers have visited Stack Overflow trying to figure out how to exit Vim.

A Vim-related tweet by I Am Devloper

If you find yourself trapped in Vim, you can usually exit by doing the following:

press escape to enter "Master" mode
then type : to enter "Last Line" mode
then type q and hit enter.

This should exit. If it doesn't, repeat these steps using q! instead to force-quit.

If you want to save any changes you made to the file, you can add a w to these commands (w stands for "write"): wq or wq!

If you need to change something on a Linux server, and haven't invested dozens of hours in getting good at Vim, you can open a file with a much simpler built-in editor called Nano by typing: nano [filename]

And if you want to get better at Vim, check out Vim Adventures, a Zelda-like game controlled by using Vim commands.

Here are three other links worth your time:

Here's how you can make a 360 VR app in 10 minutes with Unity (7 minute read)
Node.js Streams: Everything you need to know (16 minute read)
Comparing Brazilian and US university theses using natural language processing (13 minute read)

Thought of the day:

"VR is poised to give birth to new forms of storytelling and emotionally powerful experiences. Yet making VR is perceived as intimidating. It's expensive and requires both special hardware and skills. But that's changing, as intuitive tools and affordable hardware are making VR development accessible." — Adriana Vecchioli