Help I'm a Windows developer get me out of here! (Or The Escape from Vim)

Git is a great product. When we thought the problem of source control had been solved, Linus Torvalds came up and looked at the problem and made a superior product to the tools I had began to take for granted. However Linus didn't design Git with windows developers in mind. We are used to rich user interfaces where as Git's command line interface is where its strength lies. In fact Gitk (the GUI client for Git) is an abomination and I suspect a major reason for Git's adoption rate to not be much higher. I use msysgit through the Bash shell and everything is rosey, normally. Sometimes I get myself into a pickle.

Git is fussy, you have to commit with a message. I usually use the message flag (git commit -m "commit message") so I don't have to drop into the frankly alien Vim. On occasion I forget so I thought I'd document how to get out of it.

tl:dr - just get me out of here!

You start of in a screen with lots of garish colours and it seems that none of your keystrokes do anything. Even typing sensible stuff like 'quit' or 'exit' just doesn't work! No doubt you are completely exasperated. What's happened is that Git has started the Vim editor and you are in COMMAND mode. Yes Vim doesn't let you edit straight away. You have to tell it too. What you want is to put Vim into INSERT mode. This will allow you to start editing.

Press i to enter INSERT mode, You can tell you are in INSERT mode by two thing. Firstly you will see -- INSERT -- in the bottom left of the console window and secondly when you depress an alphanumeric key the value will actually appear in the editor! You can now use the keyboard to type the commit message.

When you have finished the message you then will want to either save the message or abandon you changes. To do this you need to re-enter COMMAND mode. Press ESC to do this.


To save changes Unix people have made it simple for us Windows types. On a QUERTY keyboard you simply press the key above S, for save. Its obvious! But before you do that just press the colon key. So that's :w to save. In reality you will just want to save and exit at the same time. Again to exit you use simply use the key that's two to the left, the q key. So you can either chain the Save and Exit :wq or just Exit :q.

Summary

So there you have it. To escape Vim and commit your changes do the following.

1. press i to enter insert mode 
2. write commit message
3. press ESC to return to command mode
4. type :wq to save and quit (think write and quit) OR just quit :!q

Hope this helps someone.