Automatically Generate a list of Markown Links in Vim

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

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 before you wreck something

Inspiration

Something that I have always appreciated form Nick Janetakis 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

Searchng through the internet I was able to find an article from Vitaly Parnas called 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.

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

• Nick Janetakis
• vim ref links