Connect new notes to existing notes when existing note titles are not just single words?

I’ve got a note named “Usability is made up of three things” and a note named “Accessibility leads to usability, not vice versa”. When I’m writing a new note and I use the term “usability” as part of a sentence, the other notes may (or may not) be relevant, but I’d really like to know that I at least have them. Backlinks don’t help here - I’d need to write “Usability is made up of three things” for the new note to turn up as an unlinked mention, just writing the word doesn’t help (and in any case I’d want to see the (possible) connection from within the new note).

So how do people connect/see that there are other notes that might be relevant to the new note? Interested in either a process/workflow that people use, or if there’s some feature that would help here that I’ve just missed :slight_smile:

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Yeah right now, the dependence on title matching makes it pretty limited. Especially when using date-based UUIDs as titles instead of names.

There is no feature yet. Maybe this will be addressed with Note Aliases or by the plugin API, or by a future feature. Or maybe you can think of a way of using tags or MOC pages to conceptually link things.

It would be great if link suggestions could have some kind of a fuzzier match. It would perhaps have some danger of matching too often, and creating noise. How would you distinguish between meaningful words like “usability” and common words like “made”, “three”, or “things”, as examples?

Totally agree - I see a huge upside to such a feature as well.

Please do add your support for the feature over at Note Aliases. I think it’s more likely to happen if there’s interest.

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Already supporting Note Aliases, but for different/other/good reasons. But I think aliases are a way of hacking out what I want here ie. I would have to create an alias of “usability” in my example case, whereas the word is already part of the note title so I shouldn’t have to duplicate that work. But @rigmarole has pushed my head into something interesting, which is maybe a feature or plugin:

  1. Writing a note and you use a word (or phrase) that you feel is important, should be linked and that maybe you have other notes about. In my example, I write the word “accessibility”.
  2. Hit a magic key while the cursor is over the word and Obsidian searches your notes (title only), and brings up possible matches in a context menu. Search would be fuzzy, so note titles that include the word “accessible” would also be presented.
  3. You can select one or more that are actually relevant, and they’re inserted into the text (could be in a footnote, could be just in brackets following, could be as a link/text entry replacing the word you’ve searched on.

That scratches my itch. Thoughts/ideas? (and I’m off to the Feature/plugin forum to see if it’s already been thought of).

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OK, this Auto-Linking Tool is quite close to what I’m thinking about. @Aure from what you’ve outlined here and in the Aliases for note names thread this could be a tool that you’re interested in :slight_smile:

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Thank you @ShaneNZ! I’ll go take a look. Appreciate the tag :slight_smile:

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A little bit late for the party, but I like this idea too! I actually would like if this was a plugin that I could have on one of the side panes that doesn’t auto-link anything but that lets me pick and choose. I think note aliases could go a long way, depending on how unlinked mentions of aliases get implemented (see Aliases for Unlinked References).