Vim allows you to extend its internal help documentation. As I read ThePythonCookbook, the code snippets go into my own personal help file for python algorithms. This allows me to run :help patrick<TAB> to scan through the snippet titles ( like patrick-python-unicode ). My ~/etc/vim/doc/patrick.txt looks like:

*patrick-python-unicode* old = sys.stdout sys.stdout = codecs.lookup('utf-8')[-1](sys.stdout) print u"\N{GREEK CAPITAL LETTER GAMMA}" *patrick-python-permutations* a = [1,2,3,4] b = [5,6,7,8] [ "%s %s" % (x,y) for x in a for y in b ] *patrick-python-sort* decorate, sort, undecorate def stable_sort(alist, indices=xrange(sys.maxint)): decorated = zip(alist, indices) decorated.sort() return [ item for item, index in decorated ]

While the relevant vimrc snippet looks like:

if has("autocmd") autocmd BufWrite */etc/vim/doc/*.txt :helptags ~/etc/vim/doc/ autocmd BufWrite */etc/vim/doc/*.txt setlocal filetype=helpfile noreadonly modifiable endif

I purloined this idea from http://djcraven.blogspot.com/2006/10/mastering-vim-help-system.html.