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+#+TITLE: Stop Mg From Making A Mess
+#+DATE: 2020-06-18T16:04:33-04:00
+#+DRAFT: false
+#+DESCRIPTION:
+#+TAGS[]: openbsd emacs
+#+KEYWORDS[]:
+#+SLUG:
+#+SUMMARY:
+
+If you've been an OpenBSD user for any period of time, you probably
+know what =mg= is. For those who don't know, =mg= stands for
+MicroGnuEmacs. It's a small clone of Emacs maintained by the OpenBSD
+team that's included with the base system.
+
+Being an Emacs user, I love that =mg= is part of the OpenBSD base
+system. It's great to have an editor that has familiar keybinds on a
+system that I haven't had the time to install any packages on. It also
+has (in my opinion), more useful features than =vi=, like =auto-fill-mode=
+and =dired=.
+
+Despite all of the excellent things it emulates from Emacs, it also
+emulates a couple behaviours from Emacs that I find a little
+annoying. One of those behaviours is leaving backup files everywhere
+when editing. Backup files have the original file name, with a tilde
+appended to the end. So if you're editing =pf.conf=, =mg= will
+automatically create a backup file called =pf.conf~= in the same
+directory.
+
+Backup files can be incredibly useful if you same a mistake while
+editing and you want to see what the original file looked like, but
+after a while of editing files, seeing your =/etc/= littered with
+files ending in =~= can be a little annoying.
+
+Fortunately the creators of =mg= are aware of this issue and have
+provided a way to deal with it.
+
+Edit the =.mg= in your home directory, or create it if it doesn't
+exist. Then add the following line
+
+#+BEGIN_SRC
+backup-to-home-directory
+#+END_SRC
+
+That's it. Now =mg= will still create backup files, but it will save
+them to =~/.mg.d/= instead of the directory of the file you're
+editing. It saves the file as the full path to the original file, with
+the forward slashes replaced by exclamation marks. So if you were
+editing =/etc/pf.conf=, the backup file will be saved as
+=~/.mg.d/!etc!pf.conf~=.