Putting Emacs Backup Files in a Separate Location
Whenever Emacs saves a file, it makes a backup of the original.
So if I had a file.txt
and I make changes and save it, Emacs firsts backs up the original to file.txt~
.
While I love this functionality, and it has saved me from a pickle more than once, I don’t love the way my folders get polluted with ~
files all over the place.
My blog’s drafts folder had hundreds of these.
Mercifully, Emacs offers a way to stow all these files in one central folder of your choosing.
All I did was add this little snippet to my init.el
;; Set the folder for backup files to a subfolder in the ;;.emacs.d folder of the user. (setq backup-directory-alist '(("." . "~/.emacs.d/file-backups")))
Emacs now stops littering all over the place and saves the backups it creates, to a file-backups
folder in my .emacs.d
folder.
You can choose a location, you like better :)
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