Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 100

Collect TODO Items in a Register

Combining the :global and :yank commands allows us to collect all lines that match a {pattern} in a register.

This excerpt of code contains a couple of comments that lead with “TODO”:

global/markdown.js

Markdown.dialects.Gruber = {
    lists: function() {
        // TODO: Cache this regexp for certain depths.
        function regex_for_depth(depth) { /* implementation */ }
    },
    "`": function inlineCode( text ) {
        var m = text.match( /(`+)(([\s\S]*?)\1)/ );
        if ( m && m[2] )
            return [ m[1].length + m[2].length ];
        else {
            // TODO: No matching end code found - warn!
            return [ 1, "`" ];
        }
    }
}

Suppose that we wanted to collect all of the TODO items in one place. ...