Absolute path needs to start with / for compatibility with other apps

[add1989]

Use case or problem

In Obsidian there are the following options for ‘New Link Format’:

• Shortest path when possible
• Relative path to file
• Absolute path in vault

I use ‘Absolute path in vault’ because I sync my notes using Git to a private Gitea instance (though it would be the same if I were using GitHub for example). I also view my notes in other apps sometimes.

Using this link option, I would typically get a link which looks like this:

[Note 1](L1folder/L2folder/note.md)

The problem is that I have to manually add a ‘/’ onto the beginning of the path every time to maintain compatibility with other apps. It would be great if I didn’t have to do that, but the main problem is actually if I decide to rename a note. In that case, Obsidian automatically updates all the references to it (great!) but it will strip this leading ‘/’ character and I would have to go through and amend everything again manually.

Proposed solution

It would be great if the absolute path included the starting ‘/’ to show that that was the beginning of the path. This would need to take effect both when generating the link for the first time and also when updating the links after a note rename/move.

Current workaround

• Manually adding the ‘/’ when creating links
• When renaming or moving notes, I have to find all automatically updated references using Git and then add the ‘/’ manually

Related feature requests

I only found one related post on the forum so far about this and there had been no response:

Adding symbols "/" and "./" to relative and absolute path to files

Hello, everybody! I need my vault to be readable and workable in GitHub. But relative and absolute paths to files don’t work there. E.g. In obsidian in path “folder1/folder2/file.md”: “forler1” is a root folder. In GitHub it is relative path. Every time I have to manually add symbols “/” and “./” to a path so that it can be workable in GitHub. Like “/folder1/folder2/file.md” or “./folder2/file.md” Can I change this behavior? Maybe there are some plugins for that?

[WhiteNoise]

this is unlikely to happen since it will break the nested vault workflow. It is likely that ./ will be added in relative path mode.

[add1989]

Nested vaults are not something I use myself so I’m not too familiar with how they work, but if my request would cause an issue with another workflow then it could always be done as a setting so hopefully then everyone is happy

Maybe the existing setting could be extended with another option which includes the leading ‘/’, or an extra field could be added allowing an optional/user-defined leading character (or characters, then the same setting could also be used for the ‘./’ you mentioned for relative paths).