How to find heading substrings with org-mode internal links

Question

With point over the link here, org-open-at-point jumps to the following line ("ham eggs"):

* spam
** spam [[ham%20eggs][ham eggs]]
** ham eggs

Here however (final line extended), the same action makes emacs prompt No match - create this as a new heading? (y or n) in the minibuffer:

* spam
** spam [[ham%20eggs][ham eggs]]
** ham eggs spam

Is it possible to define links that do a substring search, so that the search would succeed in this case? It certainly is possible when linking to non-org mode files, and I would like to do the same for internal links.

Answer 1

You can set org-link-search-must-match-exact-headline to nil.

(setq org-link-search-must-match-exact-headline nil)

Now this will search the buffer for 'ham eggs' (which does not need to be in a heading.).

* spam [[ham eggs]]
* ham eggs spam

To restrict it to a heading (and an exact match), lead with a '*'.

* spam [[*ham eggs]]
* ham eggs spam

See (info "(org)External links") for more details.