This is a meta-post to group together several requests about automatically excluding (not showing or remove the possibility to link) some matches in the unlinked mentions section:
Matches in external markdown links [xx match xx](https://url.com)
Matches in URLs http://xx.com/match/xx
Matches in tags
Matches within code blocks and inline code (however, now codeblocks are also used to encapsulate text not just code, like admonition. It may make sense to search in these blocks)
Matches in internal markdown links [xx match xx](page.md)
Matches in substring of an alredy linked note [[xx match xx]]
Currently, we are leaving to the user’s discretion what to link.
Covering all the corner cases will add a complexity to the unlinked mentions parser we are not sure we are willing to add.
Frankly, I don’t know if at this point we should exclude code blocks given that code blocks now include non-code stuff. Like the admonition plugins and many others.
EDIT: this is no longer a problem with callouts.
I still believe that it’s better we leave this at user discretion to review and decide what to link.
In the panel Outgoing links> Unlinked list - links are also displayed in the code block and url addresses. Which in many cases creates many unwanted connections for me. E.g. I make notes for jquery snippets both my own and copied from websites and are included in many cases }) (jQuery); or within the url the word github. In both cases, the integrity of the code would be compromised.
Proposed solution
I would suggest setting options for this internal plugin. Either in bulk or for each situation separately.
I am going to reiteraite that the link is a suggestion, you don’t have to do it if it doesn’t make sense to link. In that case, it doesn’t make sense to link.
Of course, but acting on the suggestion leads to an unexpected behavior – I agree that it’s not a bug strictly, but it’s a feature that doesn’t work as expected with another feature. I am totally fine with it being low priority/never addressed, but wanted to document it for anyone else in a similar boat.
I agree with this, and as much as it’s my choice to not link them if I’m linking a term with many links (eg a missing common thread to many notes, which is a core purpose of this software) I’m either going to make mistakes or start clicking through them without examining the context. (said as a UX Engineer with 20 years of experience if that helps weigh my feedback)
I have what is maybe a tough request here - in a page’s outgoing link’s tab, it would be nice if other pages were listed at-most-once. Once page A has an outgoing link to page B, all further unlinked mentions of A in B should be ignored.
For example, the following page is already linked to Database. I consider these duplicates and would rather the outgoing links tab say “0 unlinked”:
I actually rely on this duplication to help me create linkages between pages in different contexts; following your example, I might have three different pages with an alias of “database” (or notes with the same name in different folders I guess, although I don’t do that in my workflow) and depending on context on my note text I want to link to different external notes.
Saying that, I do strike a similar issue to what you’re talking about - I have notes that are reviewed and “finalised”, and I don’t want to link any of the remaining keywords or see them as “unlinked mentions” because I’ve already made the decision that I don’t want to link them. It would be good to choose an unlinked mention and mark it as “ignore” (Which is a manual per-mention version of your default per-note suggestion I guess)
Suggesting “unlinked mentions” based on strings in URLs (including obsidian//...) creates a mess of junk recommended unlinked mentions.
I would like to hear one of the owners of Obsidian step in here to discuss this issue, rather than some random moderator telling us “we” are not going to consider the request.
Further to this - the current behaviour feels like a bug. It is too easy for unlinked mentions to break a link to an external source i.e. website or devonthink. One accidental click and a link is broken.
Showing unlinked mention in URLS should not be shown. This is not an edge case. Nobody want to add links in an URL.
For the other problem areas like code blocks, perhaps give us the option to hide those Unlinked mentions.
Some of my notes show 20 unlinked mentions but they are all links in URL or code blocks. We should be able to hide those. So we only see relevant unlinked mentions in the future.
matches within blockquotes, except if they are callouts, except if the callout is a QUOTE
Essentially I use plain blockquotes and QUOTE callouts to contain text that I didn’t author. And in my case, I don’t care to link what others may have said. I only care about linking my own thoughts and writings
Hello, I would like to add another use case where no filter on back-linking makes it unusable…
I use the tasks plugin to know when I checked a checkbox… It adds the date to the line.
Then, Obsidian tries to back-link every note that has this date in, which is not what I want…
Of course, I can dismiss that, but I get a huge list of those at the top and have to go through them all to get real good suggestions…
EDIT: This part seems to be solved in the smoking new release I have similar issues with Tags, I use them a lot and they show in the backlink suggestion… that is useless… I tagged the notes for search, not to back-link my tags!
The only thing this feature needs, is the ability to filter back-links with a Regex.
I reallyt think there is a usecase for ignoring URLs for unlinked mentions. I have a number of links that has words that matches notes. Meaning that I have to filter through the “unlinked mentions” to figure out what I actually want to fix.
I think it is VERY obvious that I do not want to add a note link within a link to an external site.
