Refactoring One Line Links Into Wikilinks

Previously I had setup a feature of my website to expand one line links into a card. This was not a standard, even to the point that some formatters wrap the links with , thus breaking my custom plugin. Moving to the wikilink standard will allow my markdown posts to work accross more site builders without custom integrations.

expand-one-line-links

What is a wikilink

Wikilinks are standard to a lot of wikis written in markdown.

markdown-it-wikilinks

The wikilink syntax is a slug wrapped in double square brackets.

        
[[ slug ]]

Marksman lsp will even autocomplete these for you, its pretty sweet.

Vim Quickfix

You could use vimgrep to fill your quickfix list will all of the one line links but I am less familiar with vimgrep and kept missing posts for some reason, I think it was something in my file glob missing some directories.

I chose to use cexpr to fill my quickfix list using a command that outputs a vimgrep format filename:line:col:msg

        
:cexpr system('rg ^<https -t md --vimgrep .')

This filled my quickfix list with all of the one line links.

Vim cdo

Now all I needed to do was to run a substitution command on every line in the quickfix list. This one features the one eyed fighting kirby that I learned from the primeagen thoughts-200 .

        
:cdo s/\(^https:\/\/waylonwalker.com\/\)\(.*\)/[[ \2 ]]

This converts all of the full links into a slug wrapped in double square brackets.

More

There was a bit more to the full refactor, for instance some had a til/ preix, some were for youtube, and some were not pointed to my site.