On Wed, Oct 03, 2018 at 04:16:37PM +0200, Tom Wallenfang wrote:
> > Could you describe exactly what you "have been seeing" that made you
> > conclude that "the autosave feature is activated again"?
> When I edited the Makefile, saved and looked at the filesystem, there
> was Makefile~ which I don't want.

Seems Stefan's crystal ball is working perfectly (as almost always).

The files with the tilde at the end are (typically) backup files. They
are supposed to survive the session and give you a "previous state" to
fall back to should your session do a catastrophic thing.

The "auto save" file name would rather look like ".#Makefile", and the
file strives to contain the most current buffer status. In case of a
(Emacs or system) crash, you can thus recover the most recent edits.

Note that this file is supposed to be ephemeral: if all ends well, you
won't see it.

So it seems you want to configure backup, described in info node
"Backup Files".

If your concern is file system clutter, better leave auto-save alone.
It's not going to clutter your file system (unless something else is
going horribly wrong). As for backup, you can disable it or even teach
it to use one directory for all backups (I have typically something
beneath my ~/.emacs.d).

Cheers
-- tomás