Allow Adding Internal Links to Selected Text

Feature requests
,
1

Use case or problem

I would like to add internal links to existing text. For example, in the text I am referencing a paper as “Bob et al. (2023)”. I would like to easily link this textual reference to another note in my vault that represents this paper (with notes). So I would like to easily transform “Bob et al. (2023)” to “[[Internal Paper Link|Bob et al. (2023)]]”. When selecting text, rightclicking and selecting “Add link” option, this however replaces it with [[Bob et al. (2023)]], overwriting the text and not finding the note for obvious reasons.

Proposed solution

Clicking add Link should instead replace it with “[[CURSOR_HERE|Bob et al. (2023)]]”. This would be an easy and clean fix.

Current workaround (optional)

Manually writing the link and cutting/pasting the text inside.

Related feature requests (optional)

2

Another workaround

Add the source’s in-text citation as an alias:

---
aliases:
  - Bob et al. (2023)
---

To reference it, type [[, start typing the in-text citation, and select the note from the list. That inserts [[Internal Paper Link|Bob et al. (2023)]].

It requires less key presses than typing the display text. Even the works of prolific Bob with “Bob et al. (2023)”, “Bob et al. (2024)”, “Bob et al. (2025)” are easier to cite due to fuzzy search; you can type [[bob25 to quickly surface the desired paper.