Adding my vote as well.
I deal with too many terms for the same concept, this would be great to have 
+1 for this. I currently try to reword my sentences to fit the links that I want to use. I’m sure that as I get create more notes, I’ll start forgetting words and end up with different words for the same concept.
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Adding to my previously stated support for this feature with an additional example of why I’m interested, because the more I work within Obsidian the more potential I see for a feature like this.
Part of the reason I want this is that I rely on unlinked references to point out connections between notes and ideas that might not have occurred to me. So yes, I know that I could write “I want everything to be [[perfectionism|perfect]]” but the whole point is that I use Obsidian in part to see connections between things that I might otherwise miss. If I’m writing freefrom about goals, for example, and I just happen to be using the word ‘perfect’ over and over, it does me a service if my predefined alias points out that hey, you’re being a perfectionist again, maybe stop.
There are standard dictionaries, etc. for lemmatization, so perhaps those could be part of a solution? Obviously they should ideally be able to be toggled on and off, or modified according to individual needs.
Personally, I would like direct control over it. I want to be able to explicitly tell Obsidian that I want covid and coronavirus to link to the same page, or that perfectionism and perfectionist and perfect should all link to the same page.
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+1, very much needed feature
This is a very useful feature, especially for finding backlinks for languages that have different spellings depending on the case.
For example, all Slavic languages
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I know I am late to this party, and I love the idea
I have started experimenting with a solution using the existing embedded link structure which partially works…
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Create a page with the main definition as the name - e.g. “Oscar Peterson”
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Create an “alias” page with the name “OP”, the contents of which are:
![[Oscar Peterson]]#alias
Try yourself… if you write a sentence such as “Oscar Peterson (OP) was a great jazz pianist” then when you view linked and unlinked mentions on the original Oscar Peterson page, you see the alias listed as such, and if you happen to click through to the the alias “OP” page in the linked mentions section, you also see the unlinked mention to the alias.
I realise this is only a partial solution, but when you link the unlinked “alias” mention it also works by showing a (nested) preview of the original source page on hover.
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+1 plesse
Giving a wholehearted +1 to this. As I’ve started integrating Obsidian into my workflow as a biologist, this has started to become really important. I’ve already run into several situations where this was necessary. I’ll list two
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Drug names. Benadryl, diphenhydramine, Unisom, Sominex, 2-(diphenylmethoxy)-N,N-dimethylethanamine - all the same drug. And I need to reference them by specific name in a document while keeping everything consolidated because they have the same function.
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Proteins with a different gene name. Best case is it is one protein name and one gene name. More often, there are several protein names and several gene names… biology is so messy! I need to be consistent with the gene name when reviewing papers, so using existing aliasing methods is really annoying.
Part of what I love about Obsidian so far is that it keeps me incredibly focused on my notetaking. So looking up alternate names is very disruptive to my workflow, unfortunately. Meanwhile I’ll try implementing some of the suggestions above, but this really is a core feature that would change everything for me.
3 Likes
Don’t have much to add other than I’d also love this feature. Work in a field with a lot of TLAs where the canonical name is often a bit much to type.
+1 for aliases
Implementation idea:
Some markdown flavors already have support for Definition Lists. I believe these were originally intended to be glossaries but perhaps it could work for alias defs too.
See Definition Lists in https://www.markdownguide.org/extended-syntax
Perhaps like this:
[[Page Name]]
: [[Alias 1]]
: [[ Alias 2]]
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+1 from me.
Good idea. In fact, this FR could cover what I’m really missing: just Zettel IDs (YYYYMMDDHHMMss) for filenames, but being able to link to them using a title or, in this case, alias.
And for graphing or whatever other function, being able to choose which alias will be shown.
I think it’s really important that if an alias feature is added, that it is somehow implemented in a Markdown extension syntax in the original plain text files, as opposed to being chosen in some proprietary menu within Obsidian.
Otherwise, the links will all be broken in any other editor.
+1 for alias
I just can’t remember all of my page names and I don’t have that many notes. I also don’t want to have to worry about looking them up.
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@Mike Yes, that was the idea. Of course it is optional. I also like it in graph view or search - a quick visual cue to remind me that the alias exists. I’m still experimenting - I would be interested to know if there are any other ideas out there, and of course full support of some kind of alias system within a single file would be great.
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@ajparkme I have been using your approach for the past week but missed the #alias tag. One thing I like about your approach is that I can include other context in the alias note that shows in the link hover. A feature where you can just define aliases for the same note and use the alias for linking would not include this extra context.
But since your approach is always available having a feature for assigning aliases would be a plus.
I appreciate you sharing your approach it has been very helpful to me.
Thank you!
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On looking over the later half of the thread, a few things struck me:
- There’s actually more than one request here. More than two. More than …
- Some of the requests would be best served by an independent utility. (Focused development elsewhere, easier availability outside Obsidian).
- Could be incorporated through a plugin - probably a better model than the devs acquiring a working code library and incorporating it in Obsidian’s code base (the usual practice for non-core features).
- Some of the autosuggest-type suggestions have the potential to be severely irritating, even for those who want them.
2 Likes
+1 for this!!!