Automatically Generate a list of Markdown Links in Vim
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Let's make a vim command to automatically collect all the links in these posts at the end of each article. Regex confuses the heck out of me... I don't have...

Date: March 19, 2022

Let’s make a vim command to automatically collect all the links in these posts at the end of each article. Regex confuses the heck out of me… I don’t have my regex liscense, but regex can be so darn powerful especially in an editor.

Step one
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Before you run someone’s regex from the internet that you don’t fully understand, check your git status and make sure you are all clear with git </glossary/git/> before you wreck something

Inspiration
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Something that I have always appreciated form Nick Janetakis <https://nickjanetakis.com/> is his links section. I often try to gather up the links at the end of my posts, but often end up not doing it or forgetting.

Making a Links section
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Searchng through the internet I was able to find an article from Vitaly Parnas called vim ref links <https://vitalyparnas.com/guides/vim-ref-links/> that did almost exactly what I needed, except it was more complicated and made them into ref liks.

Here is my interpretation of the code I took from Vitaly’s post. It makes a Links section like the one at the bottom of this post.

[code]
  function! MdLinks()
      $norm o## Links
      $norm o
      g/\[[^\]]\+\]([^)]\+)/t$
      silent! '^,$s/\v[^\[]*(\[[^\]]+\])\(([^)]+)\)[^\[]*/* \1(\2)/g
      nohl
  endfunction
  command! MdLinks call MdLinks()

So far it is working for me and saving me a few seconds off each post I make.

Links
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- Nick Janetakis
- vim ref links