Creative (and Extreme) Ways to Quit Vim: Commands, Scripts, and Docker Hacks

Direct Process Termination

Kill Vim process using a ps pipeline:

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

Kill without ps by scanning /proc cmdline files:

:!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)

Alternative using /proc status files:

:!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

Short variant that reads the parent PID from the current process status:

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

Python one‑liner using pidof:

: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 string and decodes 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$(echo "U"); x=$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)

Docker‑Level Termination

If Vim runs inside a Docker container, stop the container to terminate Vim:

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

docker stop my-vim

System‑Level Timeout Alias

Run Vim with a timeout so it exits automatically after 600 seconds: timeout 600 vim Define a shell alias to apply the timeout transparently:

alias vim='timeout 600 vim'

References

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

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