When entering an obsidian link [] you get a drop down of likely notes you’d like to choose from, but often you don’t want the text in the link to be exactly the same as the link. At present if you select something from the dropdown that becomes your text. You can manually write [[link|text]] but that’s clunky.
Proposed solution
If you were writing your text, as you want it in your the flow of the text you’re writing, let’s say you’re writing “life [[emerges]] from lower order…”, you want it to link to your [[Law of Emergence]] note, and when you write “emerges” you get “Law of Emergence” come up in the drop down, it would be great if you could hold a modifier key (shift) that would select the note you want, but retain your text after a pillar.
Current workaround (optional)
Currently you select the text from the drop down and it replaces your text, then have to rewrite your text after the pillar, which breaks the flow
It would be more streamlined if there was a way to type first (because you need to type first anyway to bring up likely candidates in the dropdown) then have it not replace the text you’ve just written, and add a bar in front. That’s the feature I’m requesting. I understand the workflow you have suggested, it’s what I end up doing, but I often find myself writing something into a sentence, checking if there’s a related note and then wanting to keep what I’ve written, it would just be helpful if I could choose the note without losing the text.
OK, I then follow you a little bit better. I guess I just think/write slightly different, as I reckon I would do it like life [[law of...<tab>|emerges<enter>]]. I mean I often think what I would link before I write the link text, which enables me to start searching for link before I actually enter the alias for the link. Lucky me, I guess…
So I could see your vantage point for this feature request, and before it’s potentially realised by best suggestion would be to do Shift Opt <-, Cmd C which would select the word to the right and copy the alias text, i.e. emerges, hit the double square bracket, [[, find the link, and then hit Tab, |, Cmd V, Enter. But this is indeed kind of clunky…
I guess another way to phrase your request would be an option to select a text, and then add related link where the autocomplete would kickstart the search with your selected text (and keep it as an alias when you eventually select a link).
I wonder if we’re able to trigger the autocomplete on links using a commands, because then this could be done using a template.
And somebody has definitive thought that thought before, as there is already a plugin for doing just this (or very similar to this). Check out the post below, talking about the Link with alias plugin:
Another option is to use assign a hotkey to Links: Create link from the Links plugin. This allows you select the text, execute that command and it opens the autosuggester allowing the aliased text to remain an alias.
And yes, I do still understand it would be nice to have this a native command, I’m just finding that there do exists workarounds in the community plugins.
