Auto-Deleting Swaps, Backups and Undos while Quitting vim?

Question

Cluttering Swaps and Backups that I never use are so annoying and takes up unnecessary space. Is there a way to delete them as one quits vim with :q and similar quitting commands?

Answer 1

As Christian pointed out in his comment, there are some risks.

Swap-Files: They are deleted automatically on Vim exit. If you have swap files lying around, they are most likely from abnormal terminations (terminal close or reboot while Vim still running or crash). In that cases it might be worth to check the files.

To disable backup files, I would propose the following for your vimrc:

set writebackup
set nobackup

This settings writes a backup file while saving. After saving was successful, the backup file is deleted. This is a safety net in case Vim crashes while writing the file.

BTW: I had (rare) cases, where I was really happy that I had a backup file.

Well, and undo files is easy. Add the following to your vimrc:

set noundofile

Then undo is only held in memory and does not survive multiple edit sessions.

Note: Doing set noundofile at runtime, does not delete an existing undo file.

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Another idea for backup files

Create a directory to hold all backup files. Let's say $HOME/vimbackup. Then add the following to your vimrc:

set backupdir=$HOME/vimbackup//

(The two trailing slashes are important! Even on Windows use //.)

Then Vim will create all backup files in that directory. Because of the trailing // It will create filenames that contain the entire path. Like %home%user%bin%script.sh~. Without the trailing slashes, it will just use plain file names, like script.sh~, which is bad if you have the same file name in different directories.

With this the backups are there, when you need them, but will not pollute your working directories. Well, you have to clean up from time to time.

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(Unix only, I guess you are on Windows)

Regarding backup files: I let Vim write backup files. So some of my code directories are scattered with backup files. If I decide to get rid of them all (e.g. after I committed the stuff), I have a bash shell function rmbak:

rmbak()
{
    typeset opt OPTIND OPTARG depth="-maxdepth 1" action="-delete"
    while getopts ":rn" opt; do
        case "$opt" in
            r) depth='' ;;
            n) action='' ;;
            "?")
                echo >&2 "Invalid option: -$OPTARG"
                echo >&2 "USAGE: rmbak [-rn]"
                echo >&2 "  -r recursive"
                echo >&2 "  -n print files but don't delete"
                return 1
                ;;
        esac
    done
    find . $depth -name \*~ -type f -print $action
}