I don’t want to change my habits only for Obsidian, since lots functions not works well and don’t have any options to custom, I will only use it to link the files now…
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Something has changed in the behaviour of ALT+Click. When I press Alt+Click to edit a link, I get two cursors. Editing links is now very cumbersome. Is there a simple way to edit links? Thanks.
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Indeed, the multi-cursor mode that alt-click enables interferes with the quick editing of the link. We need a way (possibly by configuration option) to place the cursor inside a link by just one or more modifier keys combined with a click. Any current alternative i could discover needs at least two sequential actions.
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For me, the biggest problem is that links open whenever I put a cursor in them. This means that, when using the arrow keys to move around, a single line of ordinary text can suddenly blow up to several lines of html junk. This severely disrupts keyboard editing.
In every other editor I’ve tried, links don’t open when you “arrow key” over them.
Also, in other editors, once you’re in “edit link mode,” it’s also much easier to select the whole URL or link text. This is useful when you want to totally rewrite the link text (select all and type over) or totally replace the URL you accidentally used (select all and paste).
So, is there an add-on for this? I have to manage many links that I also have to edit, and sometimes I accidentally left click which opens the links. This becomes annoying very quickly. Contrast this with editors such as VSCode, in which the user must Ctrl+click to open a link, to prevent accidentally opening one. If anything, I feel as though this should be a simple toggle in the software or a dropdown to edit hyperlink behavior.
I am aware of Source Mode, but I would prefer to have all my formatting rendered properly while editing my notes.
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I am also looking for a solution to this. I frequently want to place a cursor into the text portion of a link, but there does not seem to be a clean way to do that in a single click, with or without modifiers.
I noticed that, on Mac at least, ⌘-click and ⌘-⌥-click have the same behavior (open internal links in a new Obsidian tab and open external links in the browser). If I had my druthers, the behavior in Live Preview mode would be:
- click → place a cursor in the text part of the link where I clicked without following the link
- ⌘-click → follow the link, opening internal links in the same tab
- ⌘-⌥-click → follow the link, opening internal links in a new tab (the option key “modifies” the default behavior of the ⌘-click)
I understand that’s very unlikely to happen since it breaks the existing behavior, so I think an acceptable solution could be to assign ⌘-⌥-click the behavior of placing the cursor within the text part of the link.
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Echoing @knakamura8’s comment in entirety.
It seems wild to me that the default behaviour of a fresh Obsidian install in 2024 is to single-click open external URLs without confirmation, and that this behaviour is seemingly unconfigurable.
Every other editor I’ve used requires something more to prevent the workflow interruptions (let alone privacy/security risks) of accidental opens, whether it be a modifier- or double- click, confirmation bubble or popup, or some combination thereof.
Obsidian’s link handling is also wildly consistent internally; Source mode displays the expanded link requiring a ctrl-click to open, Reading mode opens on single click but displays a hoverbubble showing the target URL, yet somehow Live Preview gets the worst of both worlds by opening on a single click without showing the hoverbubble, and requiring alt-click to expand the link (which then requires ctrl-click to open) despite alt-click being multi-select everywhere else.
Ideally the single-click action in both Reading and Live Preview modes would be independently configurable between open/select/expand (defaulting to open for Reading and select for LP), while the URL hoverbubble should appear in Live Preview regardless for consistency.
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Has this issue been sorted out somehow in 2025? I am also looking for a way to open links with Ctrl-Click, rather than a single click but can’t seem to find how to do that.
even though this post has been around for 3 years, was posted immediately after the change was implemented, had numerous reddit users complaining about the change, there seems to be a block by the development team for adding anything to do with cursor behaviour configuration; I feel like this will only be added once they get over this and actually come up with some kind of modular solution for that.
the best you’re going to get is this CSS snippet.
it’s also probably not a priority because of that CSS snippet existing; it’s not going to bring back ctrl and ctrl+shift clicking until they add actual configuration.
I found out last week that someone did make an extension that finally delivers this behavior.
It’s called Link Opening Restore and I can confirm it works. Clicking links does nothing, Ctrl + Click opens them. Exactly as we all want.