navigating markdown documents using ctags with vim and neovim

Question

I work on my dotfiles periodically throughout my day work or non work related (that bonsai tree that's never done). I've written a couple of markdown documents that have become rather large to navigate in vim and for the most part i just go to the top of the document using gg in command mode to search for what it is i'm looking for. it works a portion of the time, but it'd be ideal if i could navigate a markdown document .md using universal-ctags as most of the documents i work with have a TOC within them, so popping open the TOC within the document and doing a ctrl+] to go to the heading under my cursor could become super useful for navigating my markdown documents, (a local wiki of notes i maintain for referencing tips tricks and howto's throughout my day).

universal-ctags comes with some regex matching for .md (Markdown) documents out of the box, and i can navigate to a heading that does not have spaces in it.

Example: markdown document structure

git-Notes.md

<a id="contents"></a>

## Contents

 - [Gotchas](#git-gotchas)
 - [Useful Links](#useful-links)

I move the cursor under [Gotchas] and i'm able to move to that particular position in the document using ctags, but if i try to navigate to the [Useful Links] section of the document it's a no go as I'm pretty sure uctags is running into an issue with the heading containing a space within it.

I literally was able to get ctags installed just a few days, and, that was a completely separate issue upon itself, but i do have uctags installed and working now, but have no idea how it uses regex's to aid in the generation of a tags file for a particular project / repo.

Obviously the more information one could provide the better it would be in helping understand what is going on, as I've tried a couple of different regex examples on the internet, and they seem to fail, either in building the tags file due to a syntax error thus preventing a tags file being generated at all, or they fail in navigating through headings that contain spaces in them, ie. Useful Links

Answer 1

A simple approach (that fails if you have embedded code comments) is to do something like

global/^#/#

And then type : and the displayed line number of the match you want. You could assign the commands to a mapping.

Or, yank the words you want to search and do /^#\+ <C-r>", which could be assigned to an operator for fun: e.g., ghi] would take you to the header matching for the words im brackets.