How can I turn off vim in terminal of Mac?

Question

I was trying to setup Mongo DB Community on my Mac(m1). I installed Home-brew first and followed the install instruction of the Mongo DB. However I could not run the command brew and I found that it was the problem that I didn't set up the Path in the zshell. So I tried it with my terminal but It just got stuck in this here. I tried to escape it with the :wq, :q! commands and it works. but whenever I restart the terminal it goes right back to this screen not to main screen. How can I solve this problem? plz help :( (Im trying to learning so I'm not familiar with the terminal and codes stuffs)

Answer 1

You are in this situation because you typed the wrong command in the terminal and I suspect it is because you copy-pasted it instead of typing it out.

Your command is helpfully spelled out in the title bar of the window:

$ vi ~/.zshrcexport PATH=/opt/homebrew/bin:

Judging by the content of the buffer, it is almost certainly truncated and the actual command was probably:

$ vi ~/.zshrcexport PATH=/opt/homebrew/bin:$PATH

So what's wrong with that command? Everything, actually.

• For starter, it should have been:

  $ vi ~/.zshrc
  

  with ~/.zshrc being your shell's main configuration file.

  Everything after that shouldn't be here.

• Vim, which is the program providing the vi command, takes one or more filenames as arguments. With that command, you told Vim to open two files:

  ~/.zshrcexport
  PATH=/opt/homebrew/bin:$PATH
  

  • the former is the one shown in your screenshot,
  • the latter is not shown but it is likely to have a rather long name,
  • neither of those files are supposed to exist.

How to get out of that mess?

• Assuming you are in the situation shown by that screenshot, do the following:

  1. Press the esc key to make sure you are in what is called "normal mode" in Vim.
  2. Press the : key to enter "command-line mode".
  3. Type qa!, then press the return or ?? key.

• At that point you should be outside of Vim and in your shell. It is time to delete the non-wanted files you created with these two commands, each followed by a press on the return or ?? key:

  $ rm ~/.zshrcexport
  $ rm PATH=/opt/homebrew/bin:$PATH
  

• Now you should finally be able to edit your shell's configuration file but I recommend you don't do it with the vi command. nano is a much simpler editor that doesn't require as much learning.

  1. Open the configuration file in nano with:

     $ nano ~/.zshrc
     

  2. Move around with your cursor keys until you find the right spot, just like in a regular text editor. The file is probably empty anyway.

  3. Type that "export" line:

     export PATH=/opt/homebrew/bin:$PATH
     

  4. Press control+X to quit, as instructed at the bottom of the screen.

  5. Press the appropriate key when asked if you want to write the file.

• Avoid vi or vim in the future until you actually have or want to learn it.

As for why you end up in Vim when you open a new terminal window I have no clue. Maybe another one of your mistakes?