After typing this many characters the swap file will be written to disk. When zero, no swap file will be created at all (see chapter on recovery |crash-recovery|). 'updatecount' is set to zero by starting Vim with the "-n" option, see |startup|. When editing in readonly mode this option will be initialized to 10000. The swapfile can be disabled per buffer with |'swapfile'|. When 'updatecount' is set from zero to non-zero, swap files are created for all buffers that have 'swapfile' set. When 'updatecount' is set to zero, existing swap files are not deleted. Also see |'swapsync'|. This option has no meaning in buffers where |'buftype'| is "nofile" or "nowrite".