For example, I often use in my scripts a command sequence like this to optionally initialize some script local variable from a global one: let s:name = "value" if exists( "g:global_name" ) let s:name = g:global_name endif Here "name" is some variable name and "value" is the default value it will assume. Now, instead of explicitely hunting for "name" 4 times each time the snippet was inserted, I make them VPars variables by including them in "<| .. |>" delimiters, like this: let s:<|name|> = "<|value|>" if exists( "g:global_<|name|>" ) let s:<|name|> = g:global_<|name|> endif