Vim new file recovery in home

Hyper specific title, right?

I use both Standard Notes and Obsidian for note taking, but still find myself firing up vim when I need to quickly take a note. In this case I was porting a cell phone number and needed to quickly take down the port PIN and account number. This all sounds fine, but where I went wrong was in forgetting to save.

Luckily, vim has a file recovery feature. In the event you've actually editing a saved file, this recovery screen will present itself the next time you edit that file - it works well, and has saved me many times. But what about when you're doing what I was and creating a file from scratch in your home directory?

I'm not sure if it's a bug with vim or not, but for some reason when attempting to recover an unnamed file in ~ (home) the vim recovery interprets the .swp file as a directory. I noticed this and found a quick fix:

1. Use vim -r to identify the file you need to recover

2. Go to ~/.cache/vim/swap and find the swap file - it should be named something like %home%user%.swp

3. Rename this file - in my case I just used a .md extension since that was the final format I wanted, but in general I don't think it matters: %home%user%att.md.swp

4. Return to ~ and run recovery again with the newly specified file name: vim -r att.md

5. You should see the recovery warning and be able to recover your file contents - just save them this time

Hope this helps!