rm wildcard not working

Try to match the dot:

$ rm -r .*.swp

I hope this solve your problem.

It's Bash feature controlled by dotglob shell option described in man page:

If set, bash includes filenames beginning with a `.' in the results of pathname expansion.

As it's a Bash feature it causes other commands such as grep, ls etc. do not handle files starting with . if dotglob is not set as well. You can check if dotglob is set on your system using shopt built-in, it must be off if you experience such issues:

$ shopt | grep dotglob
dotglob         off

If shopt was set * would match all files, even these starting with .. See this example:

$ touch a b c .d
$ ls *
a  b  c
$ ls *d
ls: cannot access '*d': No such file or directory
$ shopt -s dotglob
$ shopt | grep dotglob
dotglob         on
$ ls *
.d  a  b  c
$ ls *d
.d

When dotglob is off you can still create a pattern to handle files in the current dir together with hidden files:

ls .[!.]* *

or

ls .[^.]* *