Others have already answered the gist of your problem, so I'm just going to add the following: That's not a feature of vi(m), that's a part of some shells (bas

Others have already answered the gist of your problem, so I'm just going to add the following: That's not a feature of vi(m), that's a part of some shells (bash, zsh). You can suspend any programming running in a shell with ^Z. In addition to getting it back to run in the foreground with 'fg', you could also put it in the background with 'bg' (which is equivalent to starting a program with '&' at the end), or detach it from the shell process with 'disown' to make it a distinct process instead of a child of the shell process (which means it will keep running when you close the shell, which is often useful).