How did you get out of Vim before you knew its hotkeys and commands?

Bought a new computer, threw the old one out.

We're dangerously close to revealing the real reason I keep trying new operating systems...
That's an easy fix. I had to burn my house down
This is the way.
The Apple approved way of exiting vim

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

The good thing about nano is that it has clear instructions for how to close it right there immediately in front of you
- Not if aren't familiar with control characters. Might was well be three seashells...
- Look at Mr. Bigshot here reading instructions!
I've always been using nano, but since I refused to ever read the docs, I'm still confused
- I can't deal with nano hotkeys

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

Literally facerolled vim, nice

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 It is so stale that Slackware considers it outdated.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

 text

    
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.

splash that appears when I open it with an empty buffer, and following its instructions.
That's the key to the problem, I have almost never open vim with an empty buffer, almost only used it to open files directly. Since there is no nice splash screen telling you how to exit when you use vi <your_file>, this meme happens.
No offense, but I was dumb enough to wonder why they put a space before ":" and thought something must be broken. Obviously, pressing q and Enter (or typing Enter) also didn't work and proved to me that this editor must have crashed in a strange way.
So every time I see vim, it reminds me about my stupidity. The meme eases the pain.
I get tired of it sometimes but every once in a while I'll come across a clever twist on it that makes me laugh
Even if the meme is old, Linux has grown quite a lot in recent years, so there are people who are not tired of the meme yet, and if you stay in some community for a long time, you will notice that many things will be constantly discussed over and over again

"killall vim" in another terminal tab

who needs another tab
:!killall -9 vim

:!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

If it was the 80s, didn't you have to feed punch cards through the mainframe first? /s
- Already had huge X Terminal on HP mainframe, using X11R3 and mwm etc. xeyes, xload, xbiff, xterm, it was the time!
Similar. I'd guess it was something like ctrl-z; ps -e vi; kill -9 procnum on a vt100 terminal.

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.

Can't relate I use nano

You say it like ^X was somehow intuitive

hold button to restart computer

Reinstalled Linux

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?

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.

why'd ya make it weird, OP

pull the computer cord out of the wall

Ctrl +Z

then 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)

I don't think this person was sharing this meme looking for honest answers, but since you did, I think this is the correct answer.

control-z, kill %1

Ctrl z

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

Shutting down my computer with the button, restarting, Hahaha exactly what I was going to say and installing Emacs. Wait

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

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

That should be illegal. Any editor containing the letters vi together must not use any keys except those that can be sent over a vt100 terminal!
- Visual Studio: 😳

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

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

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

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.

installed emacs into vim...

That's what she said.

For me its more "who are you" "I am on every system but you never use me"

vi, tac, less, more, ...

Why don't you use less? It's great
- Less is for scrolling through output right? And what does more do?
  I just use cat and a terminal emulator that can scroll lol