Also I was not paying attention when following a tutorial and changed the crontab editor to VIM instead of using nano so this is most likely me not knowing anything about how VIM works. I tried changing back to nano without success
Here is how the editor is determined when using crontab -e.
-e
This option is used to edit the current crontab using the editor specified by the VISUAL or EDITOR environment variables. After you exit from the editor, the modified crontab will be installed automatically.