Disabling swap files creation in vim

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.