The first idea one might have to allow dynamic template content could be to define autocmds that would replace specific pre-defined tags like [:DATE:] or [:FILE_NAME:] with the appropriate text. But, why define a syntax of your own, when Vim has a perfectly good expression syntax that you will eventually need to translate into anyway? Using the eval() function, you can easily evaluate an expression obtained from the template file itself in order to provide dynamic content limited only by Vim's expression syntax and parsing. Here's how: The final product should look something like this: