Copy page links from Tag and Backlinks Panes to clipboard

There’s been a variety of posts (Tags vs Page Links, Make Tags Also Pages, Same Tags as RoamResearch, Tag & Backlink Home Pages, and probably more) that talk about tags vs links. There’s been lots of great discussion around these features and how people use them differently - clearly there’s a place for both.

One thing that I think could be useful for both features is if you could right click on a tag in the Tags pane, or click a button at the top of the Backlinks Pane to copy into the clipboard links to all of the pages linked to the tag/pane.

For Tags, you can currently click on a tag and Obsidian searches for it, but it would be great to be able to have a tag Home Page as has been suggested elsewhere. Another use could be to right click a tag for “TODO”, or any other action, and then paste them all into a new “TODO List” (or update an existing one).

The use I can see for copying backlinks is that it would make it easier to make MOCs - you can currently add links that point to [[Boondoggle MOC]] but then you have to manually create those links yourself in that index page. Copying all the backlinks would eliminate that process.

Those are just a few ideas, but I’d be very interested to see what else other people could come up with by using this!

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This is a great idea. A lot of other apps have this feature, and it’s really valuable. It could be an easier implementation of https://forum.obsidian.md/t/drag-from-backlinks-to-note-to-drop-a-link-into-a-note/81.

And I would broaden this feature to anywhere a note is viewed: file explorer, search results, graph, etc.

2 Likes

Nice idea for search results especially. (side note, I just discovered the Starred Search feature because of your comment, which I was going to suggest!)

And with respect to the Drag from Backlinks request, I like that as well but would also like to see Right Click to Copy on any link in the Backlinks Pane

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Although I have mentioned this in other posts, I never formally requested this ability to copy the text from the backlinks and search results. Along with this, I think it might be nice if the backlinks and search results had a bit more text from the notes included. I know it is probably not feasible to totally expand all notes, but a couple more lines would help.

I have been in the habit of screen snipping the backlinks list one screens worth at a time, then doing text recognition and appending brackets in order to get a functioning list of links, which is helpful in my workflow. It might be nice to have this option of both copying the list in plain text and copying it as a list of links.

Thanks. Still loving Obsidian.

2 Likes

Related
https://forum.obsidian.md/t/copy-block-in-page-from-backlink-pane/4217
https://forum.obsidian.md/t/display-all-backlink-info-and-allow-to-edit-it/4333

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I have gotten in the habit of repeatedly taking a screen shot snip of the visible part of the backlinks list then pasting in Acrobat, doing a text recognition, then pasting in word processor, then pasting in a spreadsheet and appending brackets before and after all items in list, then pasting back into Obsidian.

I would really appreciate a way to just copy the back links list. It would be especially nice if there was a way to make each entire back link note visible within this list.

It seem strange, because it is possible to copy and paste search results. Thanks for your help. Is there something I am missing?

Just found the post about full transclusion of backlinks, but still feel this is a separate request. Sorry, if I screwed this post up. I think it’s time I do the forum tutorial to improve my interaction skills.

4 Likes

Hah, I don’t think the forum tutorial is custom to this community at all—it is probably just about how Discourse (the forum software) works. That said, don’t stress about posts. We mostly just want people to demonstrate some effort in making feature requests.

There are actually a variety of requests related to this one. I’ll try to consolidate them sometime soon.

2 Likes

Firefox provides a nice example of this. Hold Alt while MouseDrag on a URL and it won’t automatically click through, allowing it to be highlighted and then copied. To test it in Firefox, find a long link and try selecting a middle portion of the link with and without the Alt key (Windows)

The purpose is to take advantage of Sidebar convenience and smooth workflow. It is closely related to this feature request. Both options should be available to the user.

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Would like to add in that the ability to include the searched for “contexts” or shown summaries would also be great too for parsing stuff and automating logs and trackers :smiley:

People could just do their own scripts or at least get summary views of needed search results.

I think VS Code has this functionality too, would be nice to integrate a similar functionality to Obsidian :smiley:

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Would really appreciate this functionality. Don’t really want real time updates of backlinks… just simple drag and drop from the window would be great. Would be cool to also have different flavors of pasting backlinks to display their contents with the block quotes. I wonder how difficult it is to write a plugin for this… might be something to do.

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I’d like to throw in my vote. I see that we can copy from search results, but not from Backlinks yet.

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@a.u This has been formulated in dedicated request you might like:

It would be great to :

  1. Be able to select multiple backlinks to drag and drop them on a note (e.g using ctrl, maj like for selecting files and folders on windows)
  2. To have an option to add at the end of the note every backlink that is not already in the note in order to build MOCs without duplicates. Doing that manually is a bit painful.

Making MOCs is really worthy to keep notes structured while taking advantage of the tree structure.


To make MOCs I run the plugin “Text expand” which generate in my note a list of all links corresponding to my criteria. e.g containing a link to the desired MOC.
So I don’t need to add them manually. Then I use an external tool to eliminate duplicates.

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Here’s my way to copy paste backlinks from a note:

  1. Open the DevTools console with CTRL+MAJ+I
  2. Go to the console tab
  3. Write the single line of code
copy(Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('.backlink-pane .search-result')).map(e => e.textContent.replace(/[0-9]+$/, '')).join('\n'));

You will have your backlinks in your Clipboard :wink:

NOTE: Don’t forget to enable “Backlinks in documents”