Exclude file pattern from keeping it in viminfo history?

Question

I am comforable with using history of edited files that is kept in viminfo, the one that sets the limit in the first setting of set viminfo='100,... variable.

After I've started using mutt as email client and using vim as its editor, and that makes multiple temporary files created in /tmp/dir. These are of no interest and spoil the history of :browse old. I am trying to figure out the way of excluding those so they could be skipped or at least wiped in some hook procedure. They all can be easily identified by /tmp/mutt-.* path regex.

Is there some natural/doable way to implement this?

Answer 1

I guess I found a good solution for my use case. -i option allows to specify alternative locoation of viminfo file. So I can specifey vim -i /tmp/blackhole for cases where I do not care of file history. In my case that is specifying

set editor = "vim -i /tmp/idontcare"

in my .muttrc

Answer 2

You can also use the r option. See :h viminfo-r:

r   Removable media.  The argument is a string (up to the next
    ',').  This parameter can be given several times.  Each
    specifies the start of a path for which no marks will be
    stored.  This is to avoid removable media.  For MS-DOS you
    could use "ra:,rb:", for Amiga "rdf0:,rdf1:,rdf2:".  You can
    also use it for temp files, e.g., for Unix: "r/tmp".  Case is
    ignored.  Maximum length of each 'r' argument is 50
    characters.

So in your case you can use something like

set viminfo='100,<1000,s100,:100,r/tmp,n$HOME/.vim/viminfo

Make sure the r option is not at the end of the list, it will break viminfo for some reason.