git ignore vim temporary files

Question

What is the correct way to make git ignore temporary files produced by vim in all directories (either globally across the system or locally for a single project)?

Answer 1

I would also recommend to think to ignore files like:

.*.swp
.*.swo

as you may have files that end with .swp

Answer 2

Alternatively you can configure vim to save the swapfiles to a separate location, e.g. by adding lines similar to the following to your .vimrc file:

set backupdir=$TEMP//
set directory=$TEMP//

See this vim tip for more info.

Answer 3

Quit vim before "git commit".

to make vim use other folders for backup files, (/tmp for example):

set bdir-=.
set bdir+=/tmp

to make vim stop using current folder for .swp files:

set dir-=.
set dir+=/tmp

Use -=, += would be generally good, because vim has other defaults for bdir, dir, we don't want to clear all. Check vim help for more about bdir, dir:

:h bdir
:h dir

Answer 4

sure,

just have to create a ".gitignore" on the home directory of your project and have to contain

*.swp

that's it

in one command

project-home-directory$ echo '*.swp' >> .gitignore

Answer 5

Vim temporary files end with ~ so you can add to the file .gitignore the line

*~

Vim also creates swap files that have the swp and swo extensions. to remove those use the lines:

*.swp
*.swo

This will ignore all the vim temporary files in a single project

If you want to do it globally, you can create a .gitignore file in your home (you can give it other name or location), and use the following command:

git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore

Then you just need to add the files you want to ignore to that file

Answer 6

# VIM: Temperory files
*~

# VIM: Swap-files
[._]*.s[a-w][a-z]
[._]s[a-w][a-z]

# VIM: Commands :cs, :ctags
tags
cscope.*

# VIM session
Session.vim

# VIM: netrw.vim: Network oriented reading, writing, browsing (eg: ftp scp) 
.netrwhist

The name of the swap file is normally the same as the file you are editing, with the extension ".swp".

• On Unix, a '.' is prepended to swap file names in the same directory as the edited file. This avoids that the swap file shows up in a directory listing.
• On MS-DOS machines and when the 'shortname' option is on, any '.' in the original file name is replaced with '_'.
• If this file already exists (e.g., when you are recovering from a crash) a warning is given and another extension is used, ".swo", ".swn", etc.
• An existing file will never be overwritten.
• The swap file is deleted as soon as Vim stops editing the file.

The replacement of '.' with '_' is done to avoid problems with MS-DOS compatible filesystems (e.g., crossdos, multidos).

http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/recover.html

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1075