How to make an internal link to a heading in sphinx restructuredtext without creating arbitrary labels?

Question

I have a document with many headings and sub-headings. Further into the text I want to link back to one of the headings. How can I do this without the redundancy of :r

Answer 1

Using the headline text isn't a good choice. Headlines may change or might get corrected. There is now easy way to figure out who many and where links are broken after a change.

Using ref is advised over standard reStructuredText links to sections (like `Section title`_) because it works across files, when section headings are changed, will raise warnings if incorrect, and works for all builders that support cross-references.
Source: https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/restructuredtext/roles.html#role-ref

Using the sphinx.ext.autosectionlabel extension as proposed by Adam Michael Wood is at least a more structured approach then using implicitly defined anchors as proposed by Chris.

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You should use explicit linking with references and symbolic target names (like LaTeX does since ages.)

1. Use .. _refname: to create a target.
2. Use :ref:`refname` to reference the target.

If a target is followed by a headline, this headline will be used als link text.