How to prevent vim from creating (and leaving) temporary files?
temporary-files, text-editor, vim
Solution
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
Problem
Why does vim create `<filename>~` files? Is there a way to disable that? If it's for backup (or something), I use git for that. Also, these `.<filename.with.path.hints>.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 ```