>yes, I know, unnecessarily brutal; consider it a passive aggressive reaction - it feels good

Throwing SIGKILL at something that's misbehaving is very satisfying, especially if you have a habit of personifying your computer a bit too much.

Regular SIGINT will probably do the same thing (or SIGQUIT) if that doesn’t work. It’s absurdly easy to create software that misbehaves after a ‘kill -9’, because the only real use for it is 60 seconds after starting the shutdown process for the rare program that just won’t exit.

Yes, but not as satisfying...

ctrl-z does nothing (well it's mapped to undo in "easy" mode)

Ah. Yikes. But randomly bashing a few keys with control held before ^z still worked for me... Random key-bashing is always a good bet if stuck in vim.

(yes, I can usually get out of vim "properly" these days)

Random key bashing in vim can have a lot of unforeseen consequences for whatever poor file you had opened.

Given I never intentionally start vim, it's generally when I get thrown into editing some temporary file or other on some system where I haven't configured an editor. Not done any harm in the last 3 decades, so I think the odds are decent.

If you open any file and just type "DZZ" (in capital), you delete the first line of file and save and quit.

Even if I'd have done that, with the type of things I now and again end up accidentally thrown into vim for, that would hardly matter.

Sounds like a good time to link to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rG74rG_ubs

Hit the power switch.

(In my youth, I definitely resorted to doing that more than once)