Don't change case when updating note titles

Feature requests
1

Use case or problem

As all but the newest users well know, when you double-bracket a word or phrase, it links to the resultant note, even if that note doesn’t exist. And the first time you click on one of those, the note (if it doesn’t already exist) is created. This is the expected behavior, and it’s a good thing.

Also, if you change the title of the note, the note title is updated throughout the database, anywhere it appears. This is also expected behavior, and a good thing.

However, what this means in practice is that if you make a habit of linking inline text, it’s ordinarily going to be in all lowercase, with the occasional word capitalized if it starts a sentence. So let’s say you do this with “bobbing for apples.” You’ve tagged “bobbing for apples” twelve times and “Bobbing for apples” twice (because the phrase starts a sentence).

Now you click through on one of these and create the note. And let’s say you want the note’s title in title case, so you tweak it to “Bobbing for Apples.” All fourteen instances of your text get changed to “Bobbing for Apples.”

Even if you should decide to leave the titles all lowercase, this still presents a problem if you happen to click through from “Bobbing for apples” the first time, because then when you tweak the note title to “bobbing for apples,” you lose your capitalization in the original notes.

Proposed solution

If a note’s title changes and the only thing that changed is capitalization, Obsidian should leave unaliased links alone and not update them. (It’s my understanding that they’ll point to the link regardless of their case, so these are not broken links.) Or at least there should be an option.

It seems like a small thing, but this can potentially louse up the capitalization in hundreds of notes in seconds.

Current workaround (optional)

Right now the alternative seems to be to just manually edit all of your links after creating them, or to never link plain text in the first place – ALWAYS use the extra code for display text (even if the display text and the note name are currently identical).

3 Likes
2

For people that are not using text inline as you are doing, I think causing renaming to not update all links would be a bug, so it might be a hard sell to have obsidian change this behavior for all.

One other possible work around is to always use the all lower case page as the real page, add an alias in the front matter if other capitalizations are found in the text. So you would add:

---
aliases: ["Bobbing for apples"]
---

In the example above. This front matter could then be folded, so you did not see it when you went to that page. This alternate work around would have the virtue of not messing up the look of the text in edit mode, by having extra junk showing up inline if one is editing the text.

Still this is a work around… though it could be scripted

1 Like
3

Unless I’m misunderstanding, this is still going to have the same basic issue – 'though probably not with as many messed-up notes. Because you’re still going to risk tagging text that’s capitalized (in this case, at the beginning of sentences) and having it update to uncapitalized.

I do realize that not having it update links might create a problem for some use cases, which why I suggested it could potentially be an optional setting.

1 Like
4

Maybe I am misunderstand your problem… but I think you can avoid messing up any notes by NEVER renaming a notes capitalization. Here is my proposed process:

  • Use [[ wiki links ]] freely in your text regardless of capitalization.
  • But it you notice you are creating a link [[ With Some Capitals ]]
    Dont click on it, instead:
    • select and copy the link text; press CMD-O and paste it
    • now if you see the link exists, you can go to it, and add the alias
    • if you don’t see it, then edit what you have pasted to be all lower case and create it.

Or you can just just create wiki links with all caps and dont worry about it.
Later if you click on it, it will create the WRONG page, but it will be empty.
No problem just go to or create the all lower case page and add the alias.

Then DELETE the empty page with the wrong case.

The key is to NEVER RENAME any of these pages.

This will ensure no pages are messed up.

This is a bit cumbersome, but is pretty mindless since you can just wiki link everything, and only fix things when you click thru to an empty page with an incorrect case in its title.

hope this is valuable.

1 Like