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.
Same, every new system that defaults to nano and throws me in here when I'm expecting vim I have to stop and remember what the characters mean right before changing it to use vim (like, seriously, I typed "visudo", not "nanosudo", why the hell would I expect it to open in anything other than vi or vim?)
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?
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 It is so stale that Slackware considers it outdated.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.
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.
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.
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
