Prevent vim closing the editor when the last window/splits are help pages

Question

When I am working in vim, I often have a split, or splits, open containing a help files.
If I close other windows using :q such that vim would be left in a state with only help windows open, vim closes the entire editor, which causes me to lose my position in the help pages. e.g. Say I have this layout

  tab1 (this is the only tab open)
+------------------+-------------+-----------------+
|                  |             |                 |
|                  |:h usr_26.txt|                 |
|  A normal file,  |             |    :h change.txt|
|  containing code |section 26.2 |                 |
|  e.g.            |line 47      |    line 272     |
|                  |             |                 |
|  app_db.sql      |             |                 |
|                  |             |                 |
|                  |             |                 |
|                  |             |                 |
|                  |             |                 |
|                  |             |                 |
|                  |             |                 |
+------------------+-------------+-----------------+

If I were to enter the window containing app_db.sql an issue the :q command, surprisingly the entire editor would be lost.
It often takes me a long time - up to 15-20mins - of searching the help to finally discover that help content, so even though it's not exactly lost work, it's definitely a lot of time lost when this happens.
How can I prevent vim closing the editor itself when I close a window with only help windows open?

Possible solutions I've considered

• Simply don't close the last window when there are help windows open.
  • the problem with this is I am not paying attention to what's in other windows when I close the current window.
• Use mksession
  • this requires that you know ahead of time that you need to :mksession and the editor closing always occurs unexpectedly.
• Use a plugin like vim obsession which constantly update a Session.vim file.
  • I've currently paused using vim-obsession because of (ironically), the Session.vim files vim obsession makes often don't restore tabs containing help pages, but the Session.vim files generated by :mksession do restore the tabs with help windows. (Also another issue with tab labels getting mis-matched with the tabs themselves)

Answer 1

using the command :clo[se] instead of :q seems to have solved the problem for me.
I.e. if I issue :clo with the above window layout, it causes vim to throw

E444: Cannot close last window.

In fact it seems :close was intended for this situation, i.e. to prevent accidental closing of the editor when all you wanted to do was close a window (or tab)

from :h windows.txt

:clo[se][!]
:{count}clo[se][!]
CTRL-W c                    *CTRL-W_c* *:clo* *:close*
        Without {count}: Close the current window.  If {count} is
        given close the {count} window.

        When the 'hidden' option is set, or when the buffer was
        changed and the [!] is used, the buffer becomes hidden (unless
        there is another window editing it).

        When there is only one window in the current tab page and
        there is another tab page, this closes the current tab page.
        |tab-page|.

        This command fails when:            *E444*
        - There is only one window on the screen.
        - When 'hidden' is not set, [!] is not used, the buffer has
          changes, and there is no other window on this buffer.
        Changes to the buffer are not written and won't get lost, so