You may have noticed how difficult/convoluted it is to create Markdown links, even with different helpers, plugins, etc. So I’ve come with a personal solution programmed in Keyboard Maestro. I’m offering it in the form of a macro library, attached. (I’m not at all familiar with this sharing part of Keyboard Maestro and I hope I did it correctly). → Create Markdown link.kmlibrary.zip|attachment (2.8 KB)
The problem is that we have different configurations to adress, when we hit the “Make Link” key [CMD–K] :
- with or without some selected text
- with or without a link in the clipboard
My macro adresses the four situations like this :
| Clipboard doesn’t contain a link | Clipboard contains a link | |
|---|---|---|
| Nothing is selected | • types []()• puts the cursor inside the brackets |
• types [](TheLink)• puts the cursor inside the brackets |
| Some text is selected | • types [TheSelectedText]()• puts the cursor inside the parenthesis |
types [TheSelectedText](TheLink) and leaves the cursor right after the final parenthesis |
By “link”, I mean “any string containing characters, followed by “://” followed by characters”. Thus, X-callback URL calls are also considered as links and the macro works the same with them.
NB : As I’m not a programmer, I couldn’t find a good way to know, in Obsidian, wether text is selected or not. So, in Obsidian the macro works best if you have text selected. But anywhere else, it works / should work fine. — any workable solution most welcome!
I wish the Obsidian developers would offer something like this “out of the box”. Currently, in my opinion, it’s “half done”.