Disabling swap files creation in vim

Question

Is there a way to disable  swp files creation in vim  or at least create them all in one place so I can find and delete them easily   I find them especially annoying when I copy the parent directory while editing at the same time  Of course I know that I can use find -exec to find and delete them  But I want a more practical solution

User · Accepted Answer

To disable swap files from within vim  type   set noswapfile   To disable swap files permanently  add the below to your    vimrc file  set noswapfile   For more details see the Vim docs on swapfile

User · Answer

Set the following variables in  vimrc or  etc vimrc to make vim put swap  backup and undo files in a special location instead of the working directory of the file being edited   set backupdir    vim backup   set directory    vim swap   set undodir    vim undo     Using double trailing slashes in the path tells vim to enable a feature where it avoids name collisions  For example  if you edit a file in one location and another file in another location and both files have the same name  you don t want a name collision to occur in    vim swap   If you specify    vim swap   with two trailing slashes vim will create swap files using the whole path of the files being edited to avoid collisions  slashes in the file s path will be replaced by percent symbol      For example  if you edit  path one foobar txt and  path two foobar txt  then you will see two swap files in    vim swap  that are named  path one foobar txt and  path two foobar txt  respectively

User · Answer

For anyone trying to set this for Rails projects  add  set directory tmp  tmp   into your     vimrc   So the  swp files will be in their natural location - the tmp directory  per project

User · Answer

I agree with those who question why vim needs all this  disaster recovery  stuff when no other text editors bother with it   I don t want vim creating ANY extra files in the edited file s directory when I m editing it  thank you very much   To that end  I have this in my  vimrc to disable swap files  and move irritating  backup  files to the Temp dir     Uncomment below to prevent  tilde backup files   eg  myfile txt   from being created  set nobackup    Uncomment below to cause  tilde backup files  to be created in a different dir so as not to clutter up the current file s directory  probably a better idea than disabling them altogether  set backupdir C  Windows Temp    Uncomment below to disable  swap files   eg   myfile txt swp  from being created set noswapfile

User · Answer

create no vim swap file just for a particular file  autocmd bufenter  c  aaa Dropbox TapNote Todo txt  set noswapfile

User · Answer

here are my personal    vimrc backup settings    backup to    tmp  set backup  set backupdir    vim-tmp    tmp   tmp  var tmp  tmp  set backupskip  tmp    private tmp    set directory    vim-tmp    tmp   tmp  var tmp  tmp  set writebackup

User · Answer

If you put set directory    in your exrc file  you will turn off the swap file  However  doing so will disable recovery   More info here

User · Answer

You can set backupdir and directory to null in order to completely disable your swap files  but it is generally recommended to simply put them in a centralized directory  Vim takes care of making sure that there aren t name collissions or anything like that  so  this is a completely safe alternative   set backupdir    vim backup  set directory    vim backup

User · Answer

I found the answer here   vim -n  lt file gt    opens file without swapfile   In addition   set dir  tmp   in  vimrc creates the swapfiles in  tmp

User · Answer

If you are using git  you can add   swp to  gitignore

[vim] Disabling swap files creation in vim

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