Add option to collapse backlinks and search results by default

After I first opened a “help” topic where a couple of people told me that this actually is a bug, then opened a “bug report” where @WhiteNoise told me that this actually isn’t a bug but a “feature request”, I finally open up a feature request! :laughing:

For better overview, I like especially my list of backlinks to only show the names of the respective files - thus showing up collapsed. The default behavior, however, of obsidian is to show the list uncollapsed. Even when I collapse my results by clicking the respective button, this status is not remembered by obsidian, thus showing all my results uncollapsed again whenever I restart the app.

It would be really cool if one could choose in the settings if the default should be “show results collapsed” or “show results uncollapsed”.

Maybe also an option could be added to define a keyboard shortcut for collapsing/uncollapsing search results or backlinks - similar to the option to define shortcuts for collapsing/uncollapsing all headers/lists!?

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This is not a feature request, I’m afraid. Perhaps #plugins

This topic has been closed. :lock:

…Kidding! I’m kidding.

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@ryanjamurphy I was really close to throwing my laptop against the wall… :laughing:

This is related to a topic I created. I am not sure it needs to be an app-level setting, but I do think that your configuration should be remembered when you close/reopen the app.

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You are right, and despite doing some search about this topic, I haven’t detected your request…

Yet I think these are still two slightly different topics - and in some cases maybe even opposed to each other. Because it makes a difference if obsidian is able to launch showing links collapsed by default (the behavior I personally would prefer) or if it remembers what you did with your search results last time you ran the app.

So I think it is not possible to implement both features - unless you pin the “remember” option to specific searches or notes (which, I guess, would be much more complicated to implement). So maybe the best option to implement both requests could really be what I proposed above:

  • let you choose the default behavior in the settings;
  • introduce the possibility of quickly changing the view via a simple shortcut.

If in the end more people would vote for the “remembering” option, I would certainly accept this democratic decision! :wink: But in this case, at least, the keyboard shortcut option would be a very handy feature that could at least speed up your workflow, not forcing you to leave the keyboard each time you want to change the look of your search results or backlinks list…

What do the devs think about this? @Licat Which feature is easier to implement?

Maybe we should start a poll… :thinking:

This was implemented at some point

I’m looking for this option (to control whether backlinks are automatically shown collapsed), but cannot seem to find this…

@hulk there is indeed no option to set the default behavior, but since version 0.9.12 obsidian remembers your last setting - this means at least that backlinks and search results no longer unfold by default; if you had them collapsed, obsidian will store this setting in its configuration.

Hi. I wasn’t being specific enough. I am referring to the embedded queries, and not the query pane. There is no way to set collapsing defaults for embedded queries. As far as I know? Thanks.

Not at the moment. Feel free to submit a feature request!

I know there is a way to collapse results in the search function. Does this also exist with embedded search results?

There is a beta plugin installable via BRAT available that supports this as options for queries.

Works well for me

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