Bought a new computer, threw the old one out.

I was introduced to Linux with Vim so it's actually Nano that confuses me...

CTRL+face on keyboard. I guess Z got me out, but who knows.

"killall vim" in another terminal tab

From the torrent, the deluge, the unending tidal wave of this exact meme in various formats. The "exit vim difficult" meme must constitute at least 50% of online content regarding *nix and *nix-adjacent systems. It is so stale that Slackware considers it outdated. It is the "mayonnaise is spicy" equivalent of funny. It is the white bread, picket fence stereotype of meme culture, yes offense. I'd like to say that it's beating a dead horse, but the horse is gone; its flesh has been tenderized, pulverized, and evaporated from the sum total of energy imparted by the constant beating. If the heat death of the universe were to happen tomorrow, and from the uniform vacuum energy a Boltzmann brain were to spontaneously form, it will have been already tired of this meme.

But to answer the question, it was either that, or the big

type :q<Enter> to exit

splash that appears when I open it with an empty buffer, and following its instructions.

No offense to you or your house, but I'm really tired of this meme.

:!killall -9 vim

I guess it was in the 80s, open a new xterm, ps -edaf | grep vi, kill the process, then man vi to read how to exit properly.

This is how I learnt unix, do a ls in /bin /usr/bin /etc, man every command

hold button to restart computer

Can't relate I use nano

Reinstalled Linux

Long before I used vim, some dude shared a bunch of vim memes with ":q!" in them.

It was actually vi on some ye olde unix machine, but I remembered the meme and got out, searched up how to use vim, and then jumped back in to edit the file lol.

I guess just because how the question was laid out, I'm disqualified as I was taught how to use it the first time I used it. :P

with my first linux -system, I had an experienced friend to hold my hand while installing, configuring and usage - including vim. So, the first thing he taught me was how to exit it. This was sometime in ... 2003-ish?

why'd ya make it weird, OP

pull the computer cord out of the wall

Probably closed the terminal emulator it was running in and opened a new one before trying to find documentation at my leisure. One of the luxuries of learning Unix commands in a graphical environment.

For a more drastic noob story, I once rebooted a computer because I couldn't get out of GWBASIC. I was familiar with QBASIC at the time and that was a lot easier to get out of if you didn't know what you were doing.

Ctrl +Z

control-z, kill %1

Honestly?

By looking up the command. It took like two seconds and that was nearly twenty years ago. And I've been using it off and on since then (only off because I've not been consistently using Linux, not because I'm using a different terminal text editor; when on *NIX, vim/vi is pretty much all I've used on the terminal)

Ctrl z

North Carolina style, head to your nearest electric substation and open fire*

*Doesn't work for laptops, instead just shoot the laptop

I started on MacVim, so I could just use cmd+q. And by the time I used vim on the terminal I knew all about :commands

A tutorial tried to get me to install emacs the other day. I guffawed in nano.

I closed the terminal, the second time I googled how to quit

Shutting down my computer with the button, restarting, and installing Emacs.

I can't remember what I did with vim the first time I used it, but whenever I'm stuck in a cli program and want to go back to the shell, I usually tried ctrl+c first, and if doesn't work, crtl+z.