alt Hacker News> — Sensible file handling: backups and auto-saves in a cache/ directory, recentf for recent files, clean buffer naming with uniquify
It's crazy to me how out of the box when you edit nginx file at /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/foo it creates another file foo~ there and nginx tries to load that too
When I tried to ask emacs reddit community they started attacking me for changing the default that only I need and fits everyone perfectly.
Still can't believe I'm the only one finding that default amazingly bad.
Replies
I raise you my .DS_store
Surprised to hear people told you not to change that - one of the earliest bits of advice I got on using emacs is to set the location of those files to a hidden directory in your home folder.
I would fault nginx here instead. Tilde-suffixed backups is an old convention used by vim and emacs among others. Definitely older than nginx.
Been using gnu emacs since the 80s and it’s one of the first things I changed. Did you figure it out? If not I can dig up the answer tomorrow.
(setq backup-directory-alist '(("." . "~/.emacs.d/backups/")))
First thing I do any time I install emacs.
Note that tramp will kvetch if you do this, but it still works fine.
emacs users who are hostile to you configuring things, aren't really getting the point IMO :)
This was one of the very first things I added to my config over a decade ago:
(setq backup-directory-alist '(("." . ".~")))I always disable those auto-backup-files features in any editor I use. Never understood why that was the default-on for so many editors.
I also set create-lockfiles to nil. I think you can theoretically keep the lockfiles and the clean directory by using lock-file-name-transforms to place the lockfiles somewhere sensible but I didn't bother.
Without this I had to be careful not to acciddentally commit stuff like ".#filename.txt".