Hate the emacs tilde backup files?

I do...but for decades I have been afraid to turn them off in case I ever needed the backup file, even though I have never used them once. Finally I snapped and tried to figure out how to turn them off. While looking this up, I came across a better option: store them all in a single hidden directory, instead of littering the whole filesystem with them. There is a nice package called "backup-dir" that even provides the ability to keep multiple versions of your backup files, while keeping them all out of sight and out of mind, and automatically cleaning up old versions. Learn more at:

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BackupDirectory

To see how I pulled in the backup-dir package and set it up in my init.el file, see the change to my dotfiles project.