How to prevent vim from creating and leaving temporary files

Question

Why does vim create  lt filename gt   files  Is there a way to disable that    If it s for backup  or something   I use git for that   Also  these   lt filename with path hints gt  swp files too   How do I tell vim not to create those  or at the least to cleanup after itself   EDIT  whoops  duplicate      Why does Vim save files with a   extension    I adopted rogeriopvl s answer from there   verbatim copy   set nobackup        no backup files set nowritebackup   only in case you don t want a backup file while editing set noswapfile      no swap files

User · Answer

Put this in your  vimrc configuration file   set nobackup

User · Answer

I made a plugin called  noswapsuck  that only enables the swapfile when the buffer contains unsaved changes   Once changes have been saved  the swapfile is cleared   Hence  swapfiles which contain the same content as the file on disk will be removed   Get it here  noswapsuck vim  It has been working well for me  but I have never publicised it before  so I would welcome feedback   Advantages    The only swapfiles that remain on your disk will be important swapfiles that actually differ from the file    Disadvantages    If the buffer has a swapfile  it will not be detected when the file is first opened   It will only be detected when swapfile is enabled  which is when you start to edit the buffer   That is annoyingly late  and will interrupt you    Solved  We now check for a pre-existing swapfile when a buffer is opened  by temporarily turning the swapfile option on again   If you are working in an environment where you want to minimise disk-writes  e g  low power  or files mounted over a network  or editing a huge file  then it is not ideal to keep removing and re-creating the swap file on every save and edit   In such situations  you can do    let g NoSwapSuck CloseSwapfileOnWrite   0   which will keep the swapfile after a write  but will still remove it when the buffer loses focus    By the way  I have another little plugin  DiffAgainstFileOnDisk which can be pretty useful after hitting  r ecover  to check if the buffer you recovered is newer or older than the existing file  or identical to it

User · Answer

I have this setup in my Ubuntu  vimrc  I don t see any swap files in my project files   set undofile set undolevels 1000           How many undos set undoreload 10000          number of lines to save for undo  set backup                          enable backups set swapfile                        enable swaps set undodir  HOME  vim tmp undo       undo files set backupdir  HOME  vim tmp backup   backups set directory  HOME  vim tmp swap     swap files    Make those folders automatically if they don t already exist  if  isdirectory expand  amp undodir       call mkdir expand  amp undodir    p   endif if  isdirectory expand  amp backupdir       call mkdir expand  amp backupdir    p   endif if  isdirectory expand  amp directory       call mkdir expand  amp directory    p   endif

User · Answer

On Windows add following lines to  vimrc    store backup  undo  and swap files in temp directory set directory  HOME temp   set backupdir  HOME temp   set undodir  HOME temp

User · Answer

I d strongly recommend to keep working with swap files  in case Vim crashes    You can set the directory where the swap files are stored  so they don t clutter your normal directories   set swapfile set dir   tmp   See also   help swap-file

User · Answer

For Windows Users to back to temp directory  set backup set backupdir C  WINDOWS Temp set backupskip C  WINDOWS Temp   set directory C  WINDOWS Temp set writebackup

User · Answer

This answer applies to using gVim on Windows 10  I cannot guarantee the same results for other operating systems   Add   set nobackup set noswapfile set noundofile   To your  vimrc file   Note  This is the direct answer to the question  for Windows 10  and probably not the safest thing to do  read the other answers   but this is the fastest solution in my case

[vim] How to prevent vim from creating (and leaving) temporary files?

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