Table of content for R markdown files

Question

My workflow is to perform data analysis in R markdown files. They are a mix of text and code chunks, pretty much like jupyter notebooks for python. These files can get long with time and I like to open a buffer with a table of content to navigate between the various headers of the document. I was very happy to use the vim-markdown plugin to generate table of contents for markdown files. In this question, I managed to create an auto command to activate vim-markdown for Rmd files. But now that I start using Nvim-R more intensively, I hit vim-markdown issue 263: activating vim-markdown removes syntax highlighting and auto completion of the R code chunks. That issue hasn't been resolved since 2016, so I guess it will be hard to make both plugins work in parallel.

I'm only interested in the table of content functionality, is there another way to display a table of content on a buffer?

My previous hack was to call

:g/^#

To display a list of markdown headers. I sill miss the extra buffer navigation functionality though.

Answer 1

You could use vimgrep and the quickfix window.

Define a command, that searches for headers and open a quickfix window:

command T vimgrep '^\#' % | cw

The defines the command T that first greps the current file for all lines starting with a # and then opens a quickfix window for it.

To execute it, just run :T. Then move to the heading you are interested in and hit <Enter>.

See :h :vimgrep, :h :cw and .

If you want to dive deeper, also have a look at :h lvimgrep, h :lw and :h location-list.

Answer 2

Voom can create a table of content for R markdown files if you associate that file type to pandoc in the vim configuration file:

let voom_ft_modes = {'markdown': 'pandoc', 'rmd': 'pandoc'}

Then you can also add another name for the command:

au BufRead,BufNewFile *.Rmd command! Toc Voom

Calling :Toc in an R markdown file will now display an outline pane in a vim buffer to the left of your screen.

Thanks to jalvesaq for suggesting voom and this setup, as visible in the nvim-r documentation.

Answer 3

There is an effective solution using plugins. You can achieve a TOC, which you can fuzzy search in, using CtrlP and ctrlp-funky.

Start by installing:

Plug 'ctrlpvim/ctrlp.vim'
Plug 'tacahiroy/ctrlp-funky'

Then you can attach CtrlPFunkyMulti to a key combination.