When giving the PostgreSQL DBA Essentials workshop one of the main issues people have is how they can exit psql. Even on stackoverflow this is a popular topic. The good news for people who still don’t like to use “\q” here is the commit that will add additional options to quit/exit from psql.
Up to PostgreSQL 10 what you can usually see is something like this:
postgres@pgbox:/home/postgres/ [PG10] psql -X postgres psql (10.0) Type "help" for help. postgres=# exit postgres-# exit postgres-# quit postgres-# let me out, what do I need to to? postgres-#
Starting with PostgreSQL 11 you can either use “quit”:
postgres@pgbox:/home/postgres/ [PGDEV] psql -X postgres psql (11devel) Type "help" for help. postgres=# quit postgres@pgbox:/home/postgres/ [PGDEV]
… or “exit”:
postgres@pgbox:/home/postgres/ [PGDEV] psql -X postgres psql (11devel) Type "help" for help. postgres=# exit postgres@pgbox:/home/postgres/ [PGDEV]
I am pretty sure MacBook users will love that 
vi, mail and other applications may have differences between exit and quit.
psql will interpret both commands with an implicit rollback.
i prefer the keycode ctrl-d to simulate an end-of-file.
Hi Maletin,
thanks for adding that information. I personally also prefer CRTL-D but I heard others feel that is nasty
Cheers,
Daniel