Disable automatic link expansion?

Hello, I’m a new user trying to iron out the kinks that come with vanilla Obsidian. Thank you for the help!

What I’m trying to do

I’m trying to figure out a way to stop links from automatically expanding in edit mode when:

  • links are highlighted
    HighlightText

  • when the text cursor is within the link (such as when navigating with arrow keys)
    CursorText

  • when images are selected / clicked
    ClickImage

It’s very disruptive for links to automatically expand into several extra lines of text or displaces my image while in edit mode. I understand that these aren’t issues when I’m back in read-only mode, but it makes editing text much more frustrating.

Things I have tried

I’ve searched about the issue online and through the Obsidian Help wiki page and forum to see if there was a solution to this issue, but didn’t find much. The only related thing I found was a mostly unanswered Obsidian forum post asking a similar question from last year. I also searched the community plugin store, but didn’t find much again. It’s totally possible that I missed something though.

Is this functionality available in a community plugin or CSS snippet or something?

I’m currently using the following plugins:

  • Clear Unused Images
  • Editing Toolbar
  • Hide Folders
  • Image Converter
  • Markdown table checkboxes

Thank you again! Any assistance is greatly appreciated

When I get bothered by this I switch to source mode.

I thought there was a feature request for the behavior you want, but if you didn’t find it then I may be misremembering.

1 Like

Hi, thank you for the reply and the tip on Source mode!

I did find a feature request for this behavior made July last year by the user scotto. However, their initial post about the issue and the feature request went largely unanswered, so I thought I’d ask about it again in case it was addressed and I missed it, or if someone had other ideas / solutions. I hope it gets added at some point

Thank you again!

Did you see this related feature request? It’s not the same but some of the discussion might be useful to you. The original poster used a CSS snippet to disable link clicking — I’m not sure if one could disable link code revealing, but it might be worth exploring.

I recommend adding your thoughts to the feature request you found, to show support for it and highlight any use cases not already covered. That will also make the post more visible for a while, so maybe someone else who wants the same thing will see it and add their support.

2 Likes