Here are three strategies that I use to navigate large markdown files in vim.

Folding

Relatively new versions of vim already include the markdown runtime files package by the infamous tpope. Looking at the source code, we can see that we can enable folding in markdown files by adding the following configuration to our vimrc file.

~/.vimrc"

let g:markdown_folding = 1

Now we can use the vim’s standard folding keybindings to collapse or open sections of a large markdown file. See :help folding in vim for more information.

Movement by text-object

The plugin also includes a pair of handy normal mode keybindings to navigate between the sections of a markdown document.

[[: go to previous section
]]: go to next section

Navigating using ctags

Use the universal ctags program to generate a tags files for your markdown document.

Note that most unix like operating systems already include a ctags executable but this does not support markdown files. There is also exuberent ctags which provides the same binary however also does not support markdown.

You can generate a tags files for your markdown document by running the following command in your terminal.

ctags <name-of-your-file>.md

Alternatively, you can generate a tags file for your entire project recursively using the following command.

ctags -R .

Now you can use vim’s built-in :tags command followed by the <tab> key to see a list of all the sections in your current markdown file.