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vimtableofcontents

Vim: generate table of contents for plain text files (not Markdown)?

I'm aware of Vim plugins such as vim-markdown-toc, etc. but those apply to markdown files. Are there any approaches/suggestions for auto-generating a tables of contents in plain-text files (.txt, or no extension) in Vim? For example, something like:

CONTENTS

  ∙ Executive Summary
  ∙ Technical Review
    ∙ Biomedical Natural Language Processing
  ∙ Preliminary Work

... where (for convenience) headers could adopt the markdown syntax: 

# EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. ...
...

# TECHNICAL REVIEW

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. ...
...

##  BIOMEDICAL NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. ...
...

# PROPOSED WORK

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. ...
Solution

  • You could use something like that:

    :g/^#* /t0

    This will copy all this lines to the top. Unfortunaly in the wrong order, reverse it:

    :0,4g/^/m0

    (You may need to increase the numer 4 here, it is for your example). Then select the lines in visual line mode and replace # with tab or spaces.

    :'<,'>s/#/  /g

    Then do some formating. You could of course automate this further.