Some commands which change a small number of characters are executed slightly differently. Thus, if point is at the beginning of a word ‘foo’ and you wished to change it to ‘bar’ by typing c w, then VIP will prompt you for a new word in the minibuffer by the prompt ‘foo => ’. You can then enter ‘bar’ followed by RET or ESC to complete the command. Before you enter RET or ESC you can abort the command by typing C-g. In general, you can abort a partially formed command by typing C-g.