text editor - How to prevent vim from creating (and leaving) temporary files?

Question

Why does vim create <filename>~ files? Is there a way to disable that?

If it's for backup (or something), I use git for that.

Also, these .<filename.with.path.hints>.swp files too.

How do I tell vim not to create those, or at the least to cleanup after itself?

EDIT

whoops, duplicate:

Why does Vim save files with a ~ extension?

I adopted rogeriopvl's answer from there.

verbatim copy:

set nobackup       "no backup files
set nowritebackup  "only in case you don't want a backup file while editing
set noswapfile     "no swap files

Answer 1

I'd strongly recommend to keep working with swap files (in case Vim crashes).

You can set the directory where the swap files are stored, so they don't clutter your normal directories:

set swapfile
set dir=~/tmp

See also

:help swap-file