LKBEN11049: Howto disable the standard creation of backup files in vim (and enable them again)

Symptom

You do not want to have those files with "~" in your directories

Cause

none

Solution

The following directive, which should be added in the system-wide or user-specific “vimrc” file, disables the creation creation of a backup file whenever an opened file is altered and saved through Vim.

set nobackup

You can enable it again with

set backup

You can also set these interactively. In this case you add a : in front of them. If you are not shure, you can type part of it and use the Tab key. Vim will list all the possibilities for you.

If you just do not want these files in your working directories, but you like the feature, you can set the "backupdir" variable in vim. In this case, you still have backups, just not in the working directory.

For vim under windows:

set backupdir=c:\\temp

and for Unix, Linux, ...

set backupdir=/tmp

You can also use variables like:

set backupdir=$TEMP,$TMP,.

About the Author

Wim Peeters is electronics engineer with an additional master in IT and over 30 years of experience, including time spent in support, development, consulting, training and database administration. Wim has worked with SQL Server since version 6.5. He has developed in C/C++, Java and C# on Windows and Linux. He writes knowledge base articles to solve IT problems and publishes them on the Lubby Knowledge Platform.

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