Same-file anchors and cross-file anchors in Github Markdown,

anchors.md

Same-file anchors for Github

Making an anchor to another heading in the same file as the anchor is straightforward.

[The header of this page](#same-file-anchors-for-github)

Will show as The header of this page.

The heading should be downcased, spaces changed to hyphens, and removed anything not a letter, hyphen, or space. If this id is not unique, you add "-1", "-2", and so forth to the header.

Examples: # Some HEADER Becomes (#some-header)

# New-header2 Becomes (#new-header)

Cross-file anchors for Github

Caution

Read comment by @karlhorky as this method currently doesn't work

If you are working with Github Pages and want to make a header to another file you simply add filename.md in front of the header's link. So if we had to reference a file in the same directory named github-tips.md with a header called # Anchors we would simply write (github-tips.md#anchors).

Like with a normal command-line folder navigation, you can use / go into a folder and ../ to go out of a folder.

See the following example:

.
├── folder 1
│   ├── first.md
│   ├── second
│   │   └── fileInSecond.md
│   └── main.md
└── outer.md

Placing links inside main.md will look like:

[first](first.md)

[file in folder](second/fileInSecond.md)

[outer](../outer.md)

Thanks

These links inspired this Gist, and will also provide in-depth information, hopefully answering any further questions.

Thanks to @asabaylus and @TomOnTime for the same-file anchors. Thanks to @uranusjr for the cross-file anchors.

This "Cross-file anchors" solution doesn't currently work on GitHub (Mar 2023) with a relative file link in the same repo (eg. ./windows.md#user-content-xxx). Probably another bug in GitHub's client-side router, but I guess probably won't be fixed anytime soon.

Workaround

Link to the full GitHub URL with a www. subdomain - this will cause a redirect to the non-www. version, and respect the anchor:

-[Expo + React Native](./windows.md#user-content-expo-react-native)
+[Expo + React Native](https://www.github.com/upleveled/system-setup/blob/main/windows.md#user-content-expo-react-native)

👍

@karlhorky, yes this works. The full URL is needed - even without "www" it will fail. Dang I spent 3 hours on this searching stackoverflow, etc before finally searching on "Github markdown scroll to anchor" and finding your fix