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Asked: 2026-05-11T16:53:46+00:00

I’d like to do ls without seeing all the ~ files generated by vim.

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I’d like to do ls without seeing all the ~ files generated by vim. Is it possible?

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  1. Editorial Team

    This is better solved from within vim, as opposed to bash.

    Use

    set backupdir=~/.backup,/tmp

    to put all your ~ files in the ~/.backup directory. Change that directory to whatever you want. The /tmp means that it will act as a fallback to the ~/.backup directory.

    If you don’t want backup files to be generated at all, you can use

    set nobackup
set nowritebackup

    to disable it, but you will of course lose that functionality.

    EDIT:

    Although the above solution is still the one I recommend because you can do more with it, I just realized that ls has a -B option which will hide files ending with ~. I’ve aliased it myself, and never noticed. If you really want, you can alias ls -B and go with that.

    EDIT v2.0:

    As noted by Wesley, some platforms’ ls command have different meanings for -B, some may not have it at all. I’m using the GNU ls, and it has had this switch for as long as I can remember.

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