Plenty of good reasons for ^C not to quit, mostly having to do with the rest of the Vim interface. Off the top of my head, first ^C is for cancelling actions, s

Plenty of good reasons for ^C not to quit, mostly having to do with the rest of the Vim interface. Off the top of my head, first ^C is for cancelling actions, second ^C is very close to ^V, which is used for block-select, and very close to ^X, which is used for auto-completion, and very close to ^D, which is page-down, and quitting by mistake would be super frustrating. I think in this case vi's authors (and by extension vim's author) have picked the right choice of catering to the actual users, rather than being friendly to people who run the editor by mistake. At least they try to tell you "type :quit and press enter to exit".