Vi on freeBSD : stuck into "ex input mode"

vim vi freebsd
Amina picture Amina · May 6, 2014 · Viewed 7.2k times · Source

I'm stuck in a file. I used vi to edit this file, and I tried to quit, but I got a message like "Entering ex input mode". It doesn't work if I press Escape, it writes ^[ in my file.

How can I properly close my file now?

Answer

Ingo Karkat picture Ingo Karkat · May 6, 2014

The :visual command gets you out of it.

If your vi is actually Vim, you can find that information via :help Ex-mode, listed under the Q command, which gets you into that mode.

Related questions

How do I exit the Vim editor?

I'm stuck and cannot escape. It says: "type :quit<Enter> to quit VIM" But when I type that it simply appears in the object body.

Read More
Tab key == 4 spaces and auto-indent after curly braces in Vim

How do I make vi-Vim never use tabs (converting spaces to tabs, bad!), makes the tab key == 4 spaces, and automatically indent code after curly brace blocks like Emacs does? Also, how do I save these settings so I never have …

Read More
Copy all the lines to clipboard

Is there any way to copy all lines from open file to clipboard in VI editor. I tried yG but it's not using clipboard to store those lines. So is it possible?

Read More