Unlinked mentions in backlink suggestions for zettelkasten style names

Hi all. I am sticking to the zettelkasten style naming of my notes, like “202006051828 Topic X”. Now the problem is, when I mention “topic X” from another note, this note does not get an “unlinked” suggestion, because I have not mentioned those numbers. Is it possible for the app to actually recognize this situation and add this function? I know I can get rid of this numbering, but given that the app allows zettelkasten style naming i thought it would be nice to support it further. Thanks!

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I’ll +1 this… I’m kind of sad that it doesn’t work.

It’d be nice if it recognized the mmd metadata too… so that:

123456789012-new-note-here.md

title: New Note Here

This is the body of the note

could be matched as an unlinked mention for “new note here”… even just that would be great.

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I guess what I’m asking is that for the regex that “unlinked mentions” searches I’d like to include in order of value…

  1. the title: <foobar> multimarkdown metadata.
  2. The filename
  3. The filename “de-slugified” (remove the 12 digit zettel ID, and replace “-” with spaces)
  4. The first h1 or # in the file.
1 Like

Trouble is you’re asking for a different, less compatible, flavour

+1
my note name is like §20741 Bayesian inference and it doesn’t show up in the unlinked mentions

Are there any news on this?
Perhaps some other postings, which I didn’t find yet?

I am quite new to Obsidian. I now still might change my approach. But I thought a plugin should not break a major functionality like “unlinked mentions”.

Most people following Zettelkasten prepends an ID before the note title to make it globally unique; but seems like unlinked mentions only work with whole-word matches. I saw Fuzzy Searching for Unlinked Mentions, but I have another idea:

  1. allow user to specify some sort of “preprocessing” that can be applied to note titles
  2. run all notes title through that preprocessing step before finding unlinked mentions in the notes content

For example, all my notes are in the form of

<14 digits id><space><note title>

The “preprocessing” can be a regex like so

search regex: \d{14}\s(.*)
replace regex: $1

Meaning that these titles:

20200806023834 title 1
20200806030038 this is another title
20200806030201 lorem ipsum

will become

title 1
this is another title
lorem ipsum

after the preprocessing steps. Then the normal procedure for finding unlinked mentions can continue as normal.

(Here is the link to regexr that you can play with: https://regexr.com/5b2op)

Is this a good idea?

4 Likes

Initially the preprocessing step can be built-in with limited functionality, like regex search and replace. After the plugin API is done, the preprocessor can be made into plugins, to handle more scenarios, like:

  1. replacing _ with space inside note title
  2. … is they any others?

This is less customizable, but it would also solve the unlinked mentions problem:

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Hey everyone, I am using the Zettelkasten prefixer plug-in to give my files a unique ID. I name my files in this kind of fashion: „YYYYMMDDHHmm - Title“. This way, the title of each file is unique and I am also able to search for the descriptive part of the title when creating links inline.

However, because of the uniqueness of the title, there is no way for me to use the unlinked mentions feature for creating surprising links and connections, because obviously the unique ID in the title is not always mentioned.

It would be great if there was some way to ignore the Zettelkasten prefixer ID in the title in order to use the unlinked mentions feature. Thanks!

2 Likes

For example if the

if the note title is “202010160628-test of unlinked reference”

The unlink reference should ignore the “202010160628-” from the its search. look only for test+of+unlinked reference"

I just realized that this feature also helpful for other use-cases, like notes disambiguation.

For example I have a note which is named “Evil (Moral)”
Therefore, the unmentioned link should ignore “Moral” and search for “Evil.”

I prefer brackets “( )” as a syntax to ignore a text from search in the unmentioned link, since it’s more intuitive like in Wikipedia.

Or another solution is the unlinked mention should not do exact text search.

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I am really lacking this feature as well, in general there are some lacking zettel features, e.g. Create zettelkasten note inline.

This feature request is essentially fixed by the new aliases feature in 0.9.16: Obsidian Release v0.9.16

Even though the filename has a ZK ID, by supplying an alias you can still get Unlinked Mentions to work.

I’m going to be diving into the templating stuff to see if I can make creating a note a little more effortless… ideally I should be able to hit ⌘+N and supply a title, and Obsidian takes care of the ZK ID, filename, title, and alias… I may have to roll up my sleeves and work on a plugin I suppose.

6 Likes

I was about to post the same thing.
A note zkid title with alias title will do the job.

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A plus for the plugin would be an option to fix all the notes, created without the alias in the past.

Yeah… I agree… I wound up writing a migration for my own old files.

It won’t work for yours… but you may be able to hack it and change it if you know some programming: GitHub - evantravers/plaintext-migration