10 Essential Vim Commands Every Developer Should Master — Hard-Learned Lessons from My Journey as a Software Engineer

Vim. It’s the text editor that strikes fear into the hearts of beginners and brings seasoned developers back to their roots. When I was promoted to Software Development Engineer (SDE-2), I thought I had a pretty good handle on my tools. But on one memorable day, I opened Vim by mistake on a production server — and I had no idea how to escape. Two hours and a lot of panicked Googling later, I finally exited, promising myself to master this mysterious editor. Here’s my list of essential Vim commands, each with a lesson I learned (often the hard way) along the journey.

1. :wq – The Command That Saves and Quits

Ah, :wq, my first true friend in Vim. When I was a junior developer, I accidentally opened Vim to edit a configuration file. I couldn't figure out how to exit without saving, so I spent 20 minutes helplessly trapped. That’s when a teammate showed me this command, which saves changes (w stands for write) and then quits Vim (q stands for quit).

:wq

Pro Tip: If you just want to quit without saving (and potentially discard changes), use :q!. But be careful—there’s no going back!

2. i – Insert Mode