The idea is to create a tag for each TODO entry and then create a Vim command to list only those tags. The example will be for Java, but you'll see that it should work for any language. Assuming you use ctags to generate your tags file, add the following to ~/.ctags: --regex-java=/\/\/TODO(.*)/todo\1/ This will cause ctags to create tags for the following code: //TODO djh fix this horrible hack //TODO djh comment this with names: todo djh fix this horrible hack todo djh comment this You can then add the following to vimrc to create a command that easily lists these.