How to turn off automatic saving of a vim file with a ~ suffix

vim

In my environment, I share vim configuration with other developers (and have my own configuration additions as well) in various .vimrc files. Some places in the environment, I edit a file in vim and automagically a copy of that file with a trailing tilde suffix appears. What vim options control this? I'd like to turn the feature off, as it just clutters up my directories and spoils auto-completion on the command line.

Thanks.

Best Answer

If you just want to turn off backups entirely, the :set nobackup suggestion from @GregHewgill is the way to go.

However, I've been saved by Vim's backups often enough that I'd like to recommend an alternative. I have these settings in my .vimrc:

set backupdir-=.
set backupdir^=~/tmp,/tmp

The first line removes the current directory from the backup directory list (to keep the ~ backups out of your working directories). The second tells Vim to attempt to save backups to ~/tmp, or to /tmp if that's not possible. (The paths can be adjusted for your particular environment; I use set backupdir^=$TEMP on Windows, for example.)

In other words, this puts the backup files out of sight (and out of your way), but doesn't turn them off entirely.

Use `\r` instead of `\n`.

Substituting by \n inserts a null character into the text. To get a newline, use \r. When searching for a newline, you’d still use \n, however. This asymmetry is due to the fact that \n and \r do slightly different things:

\n matches an end of line (newline), whereas \r matches a carriage return. On the other hand, in substitutions \n inserts a null character whereas \r inserts a newline (more precisely, it’s treated as the input CR). Here’s a small, non-interactive example to illustrate this, using the Vim command line feature (in other words, you can copy and paste the following into a terminal to run it). xxd shows a hexdump of the resulting file.

echo bar > test
(echo 'Before:'; xxd test) > output.txt
vim test '+s/b/\n/' '+s/a/\r/' +wq
(echo 'After:'; xxd test) >> output.txt
more output.txt

Before:
0000000: 6261 720a                                bar.
After:
0000000: 000a 720a                                ..r.

In other words, \n has inserted the byte 0x00 into the text; \r has inserted the byte 0x0a.

Best Answer

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Use \r instead of \n.

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Use `\r` instead of `\n`.