LKBEN11049: Howto disable the standard creation of backup files in vim (and enable them again)
LKB | Created: 02/04/2020 | Version: 0 | Language: EN | Rating: 0 | Outdated: False | Marked for deletion: False
Author: Wim Peeters - Keskon GmbH & Co. KG
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 in different European countries and different European languages. He writes knowledge base articles to solve IT problems and publishes them on the Lubby Knowledge Platform where he is one of the most important contributors and the main developer.