By the way, this doesn't preserve the identity of lists. Variables that point to the same list will become copies of different but equivalent lists after restoring. There are a few bits I had to look up: * Ctrl-A lists all possible completions. So you can get a list of all global variables via :let g:. * For some reason directly writing a variable containing " " produces errors when sourcing the file, Vim treats it as an actual line break. We have to substitute the char with the string '." ".'