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When I edit files, Vim tends to create files named .filename.swp, which I find annoying. From vim -h, I see that the -n option suppresses the creation of swap files.
Is there a vimrc directive that I can use to disable swap files by default?
What is the purpose of swap files, and what functionality would I be missing out on by suppressing them?
Swap files store changes you've made to the buffer. If Vim or your computer crashes, they allow you to recover those changes.
Swap files also provide a way to avoid multiple instances of Vim from editing the same file. This can be useful on multi-user systems or just to know if you have another Vim already editing a file.
If you want to disable creating swap files entirely (which I wouldn't recommend), you can add set noswapfile to your .vimrc. This sets the global value of the option. You can then override that for specific buffers by using :setlocal swapfile while running Vim.
If your issue is more about the extra files spread around your filesystem, then you could aggregate all the swap files in one place. For example, create a ~/.vim/tmp directory and then add
set directory^=$HOME/.vim/tmp//
to your .vimrc. The 'directory' option contains a list of directories which Vim will use to try and store the swap file.
The ^= syntax for :set prepends the directory name to the head of the list, so Vim will check that directory first.
The // at the end of the directory name tells Vim to use the absolute path to the file to create the swap file so there aren't collisions between files of the same name from different directories.
Note that this will prevent Vim from noticing when there are multiple users trying to edit the same file. Since the swap file isn't in the same directory as the original file, the other user's Vim won't know about the swap file and won't warn them that it's already being edited.
vim temp.txt --some-command-that-disable-swap ? My use case is some watcher will keep watching for any change in the directory, so only by then I would want to disable swap to prevent collision.
Oct 14, 2019 at 2:59
One great way to avoid creating annoying swap files is to open files you don't intend to change with the -R flag. This makes the file read-only and has a nice side effect of not creating a swap file. If you later decide to edit the file, you can just :set noreadonly.
Interestingly, if you turn off readonly, the swap file then isn't actually created until you then make a change.
view which is precisely equivalent to vim -R (and it's less to type)
noswapfileas suggested below. I eventually gave in and turned that off, though, because apparently the benefits outweigh the annoyances--buuuuuut I don't actually remember what convinced me to restore swap file usage. Probably my computer crashed and I was unable to restore some files that I'd lost, which would have been trivial with swap files turned on.