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Saving Our Work

To save the change we just made to our file, we must enter an ex command while in com- mand mode. This is easily done by pressing the “:” key. After doing this, a colon charac- ter should appear at the bottom of the screen:

:

:

To write our modified file, we follow the colon with a “w” then Enter:

:w

:w

The file will be written to the hard drive and we should get a confirmation message at the bottom of the screen, like this:

"foo.txt" [New] 1L, 46C written

"foo.txt" [New] 1L, 46C written

Tip: If you read the vim documentation, you will notice that (confusingly) com- mand mode is called normal mode and ex commands are called command mode.

Beware.

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