How to exit Vim

My preferred method: :x. But you have a few choices:

Command	Details
:q	Quits, but only if no changes were made
:q!	Quits without saving any changes. Always works
:wq	Writes (saves) and quits. Always works. Importantly, this always saves, meaning the file’s ‘last modified’ time will change
:x	Saves only if changes were made, and then quits. Always works.

Now that you know how to quit vim I feel obligated to say: spend some getting familiar with it. Vim is very powerful, and has been a major improvement to my workflow; I’ll never work without it again.¹

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Helpful Links

• Vim :x command – Hashrocket

Notes

1. I don’t do much work in actual Vim, but I always use the keybidnings. VSCode and JetBrains both have great Vim bindings. ↩︎