How to Save a File in Vim or Vi and Quit the Editor

3 min readDec 9, 2019

Save a File in Vim or Vi and Quit the Editor

Vim or Vi is the popular text editor among the Linux System Administrators and Software Developers. Vim comes preinstalled on major Linux distributions and macOS. The Vim text editor is used to edit configuration files or program files. In this tutorial, you are going to learn how to Save a File in Vim or Vi and Quit the Editor.

Vim / Vi Modes

There are two modes in Vim text editor which are given below:

After launching Vim each time you are in Normal Mode. In the Normal Mode, you can navigate through the file and can execute Vim commands.

While you can launch Insert Mode by pressing i when you are in Normal Mode. In Insert Mode, you can insert or delete characters as in other text editors. To go back to normal Mode just press Esc key.

How to open/create a file in Vim or Vi

It’s very easy to open a file in Vim and edit it. To open a file just type Vim followed by the filename you want to create or edit.

The basic syntax for opening a file in Vim text editor is given below:

vim [options] filename.txt

You can run below command to open demofile.txt file in Vim editor:

vim demofile.txt

The output should look like:

How to Save a file in Vim or Vi

You can save a file in Vim or Vi by pressing :w followed by Enter key without quitting the file. Now follow the below steps to save the file:

If you are in INSERT MODE then press Esc key to come in NORMAL MODE
Then type :w to write the changes to the file.
Finally hit Enter to submit all the changes.

How to Save and Quit a file in Vim or Vi

You can save and quit a file in Vim or Vi text editor by pressing :wq followed by Enter key. Now follow the below steps to save and quit the file:

If you are in INSERT MODE then press Esc key to come in NORMAL MODE
Then type :wq to write the changes to the file.
Finally hit Enter to submit all the changes and Quit Vim.

How to Quit Vim by trashing all changes

You can quit Vim or Vi text editor without saving changes by pressing :q followed by Enter key. Now follow the below steps to save and quit the file:

If you are in INSERT MODE then press Esc key to come in NORMAL MODE
Then type :q to write the changes to the file.
Finally hit Enter to submit all the changes and Quit Vim.

You can learn more about Vim commands by typing following command in the terminal:

vimtutor

To launch vimtutor in the French language run below command:

vimtutor fr

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you have learned How to Save a File in Vim or Vi and Quit the Editor. If You have any queries regarding this please comment below.

Originally published at https://linux4one.com on December 9, 2019.