Add in the bonus confusion that you may not have even been trying to run vim, and in fact may not know what it is (hey, everyone's a beginner some time), but have landed there due to a default $EDITOR value.

[EDIT] also, a typical mid-level computer user's tendency to slap "ESC" when panicked. Ha!

Which OS/Linux distribution set default $EDITOR to vim? Personally I've never seen one, and I don't think vim is a sane default value for $EDITOR.

I dunno if it's actually vim or some variation on it, but it is the default on, for example, Arch Linux, although I believe most other distros dropped me into it as well (e.g. git commit / rebase -i).

If there is such a thing as user hostile in the world of CLI tools, then dropping the user unannounced into vi with some open buffer most definitely counts as user hostile.

Don't know about $EDITOR, but if you issue a git commit in Windows, and forget to specify -m, then you end up in vim.

In Jessie, visudo lands you in nano, unless you explicitly set the $EDITOR.

What are your thoughts on $VISUAL?

> you may not have even been trying to run vi

git rebase -i

For example

Ok, so anyone with any terminal experience but no vim experience would press <ctrl>-c.

Then, the program tells them "Type :quit<Enter> to exit Vim"

And if the user is capable of reading, they shouldn't have any problem.

If they don't know about ctrl-c, they shouldn't be using a terminal editor.

Try actually following those instructions. They don't work. There is a step missing, and you may get warnings even if you know to hit escape first.

You don't have to hit escape, ctrl-c puts you in normal mode.

If vim opens and that's the first thing you try, then it'll work, yeah.

But if you've typed anything, this won't quite work. <ctrl> c will take you out of insert mode, but won't offer any prompt. <ctrl> c again will bring up the quit prompt, but that's not intuitive the way doing it the first time is. And if you type the wrong thing after the first <ctrl> c, you'll break back into insert mode and have to take another run at it.

I remember getting stuck in vim because git bash uses it as a default editor. It happened when I forgot to enter a commit message, which meant that I started typing a commit message and thereby lost the useful prompt when I went to quit.

edit: per another thread, this gets far worse if you don't realize the ':' is active and not a prompt to "type: quit". That error sets off a maze that will never show you the prompt again to find your mistake.

E37: No write since last change (add ! to override)

In that case I'd just close the terminal window if I was running the terminal from a GUI session. Does that count?