Power user here with over 16,000 notes that have been dragged along through multiple PKM evolutions. I love Obsidian.
I recently noticed that the action of copying any note content to the clipboard results in the forced-rewriting of all wikilink formatted links into mediawiki format.
My typical flow includes a fair amount of slicing and dicing of notes in and out of the clipboard. This behavior is quickly corrupting the links in every note I touch.
The only way to avoid this is “Paste as plaintext” (Ctrl+Shift+V) but then I lose all of the Obsidian Mardown. Not a workaround.
I am not sure if this is a bug, a new feature, or an unintended side effect of the “Copying text from the editor now includes HTML formatting, making it easier to paste into apps like Google Docs.” feature in the changelog for version 1.12 - as it is clearly being done prior to the content being placed in the clipboard.
Is anyone else experiencing similar and found a way to change it back?
[[Link to a Note]] -> becomes -> [Link to a Note](Link%20to%20a%20Note)
[[Link to a Note|Alias for Note]] -> becomes -> [Alias for Note](Link%20to%20a%20Note)
Version: 1.12.4 (Linux & Windows)
Things I have tried
Tested copying and pasting various different formats under different conditions to characterize behavior.
Vault Setings → Files and Links → Links → Use [[Wikilinks]] = Enabled
My workaround has been to switch to editing mode to copy.
In the sandbox, it happens when copying from Reading but not when copying from Live Preview or Source.
But that’s probably an annoying workaround if you’re on mobile—where switching back to Reading might be a hassle—or copying from a bunch of format-heavy notes—where switching view modes might change your viewport or rendering.
I have had my settings at:
Editor > Advanced > Convert Pasted HTML to Markdown
ON for ages.
Something happened in the last version updates that brought this change.
If you turn it OFF, you get back the old behavior but I decided to keep it ON and paste with CTRL+SHIFT+V from now on because I may need that setting ON for other cases I do not foresee.
This actually may be a bug and it may have been filed over at the Bug reports section…?
Because even if you copy in Source Mode or Live Preview, the problem arises.
Same issue here. Fortunately for my personal use case “Paste as plaintext” (Ctrl+Shift+V) is an OK temporary (hopefully) workaround.
My biggest concern is when copy/pasting text from inside my vault - if I forget to “paste as plaintext”, the internal links are “silently” turned into external hyperlinks. So I updated my style settings to set the external link color to something that really stands out.