Prevent Vim from recording events for certain filetypes

Question

To add to this stackoverflow question, what should one put in their .vimrc to ensure 'private editing' of certain file extensions (e.g. .gpg files).

Without compromising the effectiveness of the session, no info about work done should be saved, including registers, search history, command history, views, swaps, etc. For gpg files, one can use this vim plugin, but besides editing the plugin, how would one extend these discussed ideas to arbitrary file types?

We'll probably make use of the following commands,

if <ft in privacy_ext_list>
  set noswapfile
  set noundofile
  set viminfo=
endif 

but besides the appropriate conditional statement, what's missing?

Further, is there a way with Vimscript to make an array of file extensions and then evaluate if the current filetype is within the array?

Answer 1

Here is the full list of settings which should be added to your .vimrc if you want to prevent any leakage of sensitive files.

set nobackup
set nowritebackup
set noundofile
set noswapfile
set viminfo=""
set noshelltemp
set history=0
set nomodeline
set secure

I recommend you create a new configuration file called .vimrc_secure and run Vim with vim -u ~/.vimrc_secure (or create a script/alias) when you want to edit your sensitive file. This will minimize the risk of a malicious plugin or buggy feature.