Creative (and Crazy) Ways to Force‑Exit Vim

Background

Luke Stephens created the GitHub repository how-to-exit-vim , which aggregates a variety of ways to force Vim to quit. The project quickly attracted over 2,400 stars and sparked discussion on Hacker News.

Process‑based termination methods

Kill the Vim process using ps to locate the PID:

:!ps axuw | grep vim | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9

Kill Vim without ps by scanning /proc for the command line "vim":

:!kill -9 $(find /proc -name "cmdline" 2>/dev/null | while read procfile; do if grep -Pa '^vim\0' "$procfile" &>/dev/null; then echo $procfile; fi; done | awk -F'/' '{print $3}' | sort -u)

Use the status file of each process to find Vim and kill it:

:!find /proc -name status | while read file; do echo "$file: "; cat $file | grep vim; done | grep -B1 vim | grep -v Name | while read line; do sed 's/^\/proc\///g' | sed 's/\/.*//g'; done | xargs kill -9

Extract Vim’s parent PID directly from /proc/$$/status (shorter, no ps ):

:!grep -P "PPid:\t(\d+)" /proc/$$/status | cut -f2 | xargs kill -9

Python one‑liner that obtains Vim’s PID via pidof and sends SIGTERM :

:py3 import os,signal;from subprocess import check_output;os.kill(int(check_output(["pidof","vim"]).decode('utf-8')),signal.SIGTERM)

Obfuscated “shortest” method that builds a base64‑encoded command string and executes it:

:!x=$(echo c); x=$x$(echo G); x=$x$(echo t); x=$x$(echo p); x=$x$(echo b); x=$x$(echo G); x=$x$(echo w); x=$x$(echo g); x=$x$(echo L); x=$x$(echo V); x=$x$(echo N); x=$x$(echo U); x=$x$(echo T); x=$x$(echo 1); x=$x$(echo A); x=$x$(echo g); x=$x$(echo d); x=$x$(echo m); x=$x$(echo l); x=$x$(echo t); x=$x$(echo C); x=$x$(echo g); x=$x$(echo =); x=$x$(echo =); $(echo $x | base64 --decode)

Higher‑level approaches

If Vim runs inside a Docker container, stop the container instead of killing the process directly:

docker run --rm -it --name my-vim -v `pwd`:/root thinkca/vim

docker stop my-vim

Set a timeout so Vim automatically exits after a given period (e.g., 10 minutes): timeout 600 vim Or create an alias that wraps Vim with the timeout command:

alias vim='timeout 600 vim'

Safety note

Some of the one‑liners are intentionally destructive (e.g., pulling the power plug or executing obscure Bash code). Running them on a production machine can cause data loss or system instability; they are provided for illustration only.

References

GitHub repository: https://github.com/hakluke/how-to-exit-vim

Hacker News discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21988968