Sudo Save a file as Regular User

The Problem

Know that feeling when you incorrectly open a file as a regular user but you just can’t damn save the file because it’s owned by root?

The Simple Fix

Too late in my life I realised there is a very simple fix, it’s simply to sudo dd of the output file like so:

:w !sudo dd of=%

% is simply the vim register that expands to the currently opened file.

This pretty much works everywhere, even with regular vi.

The other alternative is to use tee as:

:w !sudo tee %

But that has the disadvantage of all printing the contents of the file to STDOUT.