There are actually many other ways to enter Insert Mode as well, like o, O, a, A, I, and so on.įind it in the Documentation: :h Insert, :h i_, :h o, :h O, :h a, :h A, :h I. The most common way to make this switch is by pressing i in Normal mode after navigating the cursor to the place that we are going to edit. If we need to make changes to the current file, first we need to switch to Insert Mode. By default, we are in the Normal Mode right after we open a file. You use Insert Mode to edit the current file (in Vim, this is normally referred to as buffer). Even if you are already in Normal Mode, pressing ESC will keep you in Normal Mode, so no worries.įind it in the Documentation: :h Normal, :h mode-switching. And the most canonical way of entering Normal Mode is by pressing ESC.

Say, if we want to read the documentation of vim-modes, then we have to first make sure we are in Normal Mode before typing in :h vim-modes. Normal Mode is crucial since it's only in Normal Mode that we can run commands (there are exceptions but those are beyond the scope of this article).

But there are three modes that we need to be aware of: Normal Mode, Insert Mode, and Command-line Mode.

You may run :h vim-modes inside Vim to read the documentation if you would like to know more.įortunately, we don't have to know all of them in order to get started. There are seven BASIC modes in Vim and seven additional modes that are considered variants of the BASIC modes. If you want to understand in more detail how this works, let's dive in.

If you made some changes and would rather discard them, type :q! and press Enter/ return.

If you made some changes and would like to keep them, type :wq and press Enter/ return.

If you didn't make any changes, type :q and press Enter/ return.

The next step depends on the current status and your expectations:.

Make sure you are using the English input method.

To do that, first we need to press ESC a few times, and run the command provided, for example, :h vim-modes, and press Enter. I will also include the command that you can use to reveal the corresponding help documentation. In this article, we'll cover some fundamental topics like how to exit Vim, rather than quitting Vim. I know that Vim can be challenging to work in for people who are not familiar with it. For all the IDEs/editors that I have used, the Vim plugin is always the very first plugin that I install. I've been using Vim since the first year I started coding.

Vim close all windows but current one