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Comment by leephillips | Hacker News Reader

It’s not enough. You should go all the way:

    set nobackup
    set nowritebackup
    set noundofile
    set noswapfile

I explain why at https://lee-phillips.org/badvim/

Also, it’s best to just have one instance of Vim running, in server mode, so you can send files to it from the command line.

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Why would you not just set the location of the backup and swapfiles to a fixed place in your system?

Try this:

    set backupdir=~/.vim/backups,.
    set directory=~/.vim/swapfiles,.

It will only write in the current directory, if ~/.vim/backups does not exist, and the dot is just there for portability, so nothing breaks when using my vimrc on a new system.

Edit: Upon actually reading your blog-post, I understand at least one reason - my options may not change the behaviour of a file not being written to the correct inode, so you have a point for some build systems.

I actually learned rather much reading this, thank you for sharing!

In fact, I think your idea is better, and I’ll probably switch to doing that some day, just in case one of these files turns out to save me.

Edit: Hmmm. I’ll have to think some more about it. Anyway, glad you found my witeup useful.

You should end your swapfile directory setting with two slashes, i.e.:

  set directory=~/.vim/swapfiles//,.

From the help text for "directory":

> For Unix and Win32, if a directory ends in two path separators "//", the swap file name will be built from the complete path to the file with all path separators replaced by percent '%' signs (including the colon following the drive letter on Win32). This will ensure file name uniqueness in the preserve directory.

I laughed at the poetry of the line "I don’t really want Vim to litter my filesystem with all of these piles of nervous energy."

Truth

I was still thinking about this today. "I have all these receipts everywhere..."

I’m glad this made an impression in you! (I know what you mean about the receipts.)

Persistent undo is one of the best features in Vim. On any permanent working environment, I would definitely enable it.

My undo files are in ~/.cache/

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