Disabling swap files creation in vim

Question

To disable swap files from within vim, type

:set noswapfile

To disable swap files permanently, add the below to your ~/.vimrc file

set noswapfile

For more details see the Vim docs on swapfile

Set the following variables in .vimrc or /etc/vimrc to make vim put swap, backup and undo files in a special location instead of the working directory of the file being edited:

set backupdir=~/.vim/backup//
set directory=~/.vim/swap//
set undodir=~/.vim/undo//

Using double trailing slashes in the path tells vim to enable a feature where it avoids name collisions. For example, if you edit a file in one location and another file in another location and both files have the same name, you don't want a name collision to occur in ~/.vim/swap/. If you specify ~/.vim/swap// with two trailing slashes vim will create swap files using the whole path of the files being edited to avoid collisions (slashes in the file's path will be replaced by percent symbol %).

For example, if you edit /path/one/foobar.txt and /path/two/foobar.txt, then you will see two swap files in ~/.vim/swap/ that are named %path%one%foobar.txt and %path%two%foobar.txt, respectively.

I found the answer here:

vim -n <file>

opens file without swapfile.

In addition:

set dir=/tmp

in .vimrc creates the swapfiles in /tmp.

here are my personal ~/.vimrc backup settings

" backup to ~/.tmp 
set backup 
set backupdir=~/.vim-tmp,~/.tmp,~/tmp,/var/tmp,/tmp 
set backupskip=/tmp/*,/private/tmp/* 
set directory=~/.vim-tmp,~/.tmp,~/tmp,/var/tmp,/tmp 
set writebackup

I agree with those who question why vim needs all this 'disaster recovery' stuff when no other text editors bother with it. I don't want vim creating ANY extra files in the edited file's directory when I'm editing it, thank you very much. To that end, I have this in my _vimrc to disable swap files, and move irritating 'backup' files to the Temp dir:

" Uncomment below to prevent 'tilde backup files' (eg. myfile.txt~) from being created
"set nobackup

" Uncomment below to cause 'tilde backup files' to be created in a different dir so as not to clutter up the current file's directory (probably a better idea than disabling them altogether)
set backupdir=C:\Windows\Temp

" Uncomment below to disable 'swap files' (eg. .myfile.txt.swp) from being created
set noswapfile

You can set backupdir and directory to null in order to completely disable your swap files, but it is generally recommended to simply put them in a centralized directory. Vim takes care of making sure that there aren't name collissions or anything like that; so, this is a completely safe alternative:

set backupdir=~/.vim/backup/
set directory=~/.vim/backup/