To disable "Entering Ex mode" in Vim

Question

I get the following 10X times a day by accident.

Entering Ex mode. Type "visual" to go to Normal mode.

How can you disable the combo which causes it in Vim?

Answer 1

This answer is based on @NielsBom's comment 4. October 2012 and on @BrianCarper's answer 13. August 2009.

I think NielsBom is completely right, please see the article. The command map is really evil in Vim and has caused me a lot of problems during years. I did not realize the thing before NielsBom's comment. So please use the following command instead:

:nnoremap Q <Nop>

Answer 2

The "combo" is Q. To disable it, simply map Q to something else:

:map Q <whatever>

I use gq, which is used to format text.

If you don't want it do do anything map it to <Nop>:

:map Q <Nop>

Answer 3

If you don't want to map it to something else, just use :unmap. If you do have something else in mind, :map will work - take a look at the help pages to see the variations to specify what modes the map will be used in.

Answer 4

<Nop> is meant for use in mapping keys to "nothing". See :h <Nop>.

:map Q <Nop>

Or put it in your ~/.vimrc:

map Q <Nop>

.

Answer 5

Another, albeit slightly more extreme option, would be to switch to https://neovim.io, which has removed ex-mode entirely, due to no one ever actually using it for anything ever.