stop picking up swp files

You can have a global .gitignore file. If you use vim, then you should modify that so that in any project you ever do, git will not care about .swp files.

  
# Matches Vim swap files like .filename.swp
# .  - matches the leading dot Vim prepends to the original filename
# *  - matches any characters (the original filename, e.g., "example.txt")
# .sw - matches the literal swap file extension prefix
# ?  - matches any single character (p, o, n, etc.)
#       Vim uses .swp first, then falls back to .swo, .swn, etc.
#       if a swap file already exists
.*.sw?