[AJRF]

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.

[antonyh]

Changing this to save elsewhere is the #1 improvement to Emacs. It bugs me whenever any software creates backups in the same location as the original.

That said, Nginx is also wrong and shouldn't do that.

[k_bx]

I was proposing to make default where those files are not created, since Emacs is actually surprisingly great out of the box with no configuration, except for this "little" thing. Apparrently, some people believe it's perfect as it is

[mksybr]

It should default to a single location maybe a XDG directory instead of polluting every directory

[NetMageSCW]

What happens when you edit multiple files from different folders with the same name?

[jlarocco]

I tell emacs to create all of the files in "~/.backups", and it names them using the full pathname with "/" replaced with "!". So "~/foo/bar.txt" -> "!home!username!foo!bar.txt~"