I think it would be very helpful, and an extremely powerful tool, to be able to link between words within notes. I don’t always want to create a new note just so I can link the title to that word. I think this would help accomplish one of the biggest tenants of an effective knowledge management system, which is to eliminate barriers that prevent seamlessly flowing from one idea to the next, similar to how our brains work. To mention the word “stress” in one note and be able to go directly to where I mention it in another note would be extremely helpful, especially when the word is used in different topics that would not benefit from being moved to a single new topic note with the title backlinked. I know one of the goals of Obsidian is to find previously unknown connections between ideas, and I think this would be a major step to that end.
Some ideas for implementation include:
- An option to highlight a word and right-click to view where this word is used in other notes. This would be a better option than tying it in with the normal Linked/Unlinked Mentions feature, as this feature would get very cluttered if it automatically displayed all matched words across all notes.
- It might also be helpful to filter out “stop words” such as “a”, “the”, “of”, etc. to limit the search results.
- If this was implemented as a feature separate from Mentions, I don’t think it would be necessary to include the ability to create a new note from the highlighted word, as this would just go back to linking to titles.