Neovim provides many ways to navigate within documents, and this tip creates a simple keymap that makes it quick and easy to jump between markdown headings, which can be a big speed boost in longer markdown documents.
Create a markdown directory under ftplugin if it doesn't
already exist, then add a file containing the following keymaps:
vim.keymap.set("n", "<A-j>", "/^#\\+ <CR>")
vim.keymap.set("n", "<A-k>", "?^#\\+ <CR>")
These keymaps take advantage of the search operators / and ? to search forward and
backward from the current cursor position, respectively. In each case, Neovim searches for the
pattern ^#\\+, which matches any line that starts with one or more # characters followed by a
space. While this is a fairly naive pattern that may produce some false matches, it is very simple to
implement and works quite well for most markdown documents.
As a quick demo, let's take the following Markdown file. Starting from the top, in steps 1 and 2 we
hit <A-j> to step forward through the headings, then finally in step 3 we use <A-k> to jump back
up to the previous heading:
This keymap also supports counts, allowing you to navigate even faster by jumping multiple headings at a time.
If you would like to see another way to implement the same function but using Treesitter, take a look at this tip.