In Vim you are more than likely to want to close a file at some point after opening it.

If you open a file, have a skim through and want to close it again, you can do so with the :quit command. This can be shortened to :q.

If you make some rubbish changes and want to quit and discard them, force quit with :q!.

If you make some useful changes you can write them with :w but if you want to write and quit, combine the two with :wq. If the file doesn’t currently have a filename, you can specify one with :wq {file}. If the file is read only, you can force it to save with :wq! – this should work as long as the file has a name.

For a short and sweet alternative, you can write changes (only if any exist) and quit using the :xit command or ? for short.

If you prefer to avoid ex commands, you can also use ZZ instead which is perhaps the fastest yet as it’s just a double tap of the same key.

See :help :q for more details.

Lovingly typed (in Vim) by Guy Routledge

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