There are bug reports of people not liking the way things in non-escaped single square brackets are highlighted (see this and this). I don’t think they should be highlighted either, but I realise that’s just a personal preference!
But preference aside, live preview is currently handling nested non-escaped square brackets erratically. Reading view displays everything perfectly sensibly and consistently so I’d describe this as a bug/set of bugs rather than personal preference. I hope I’ve managed to document this well!
Steps to reproduce
Here’s a test note in a brand new vault that has had nothing doing to it other than toggling live preview on:
Opening internal link brackets hidden; closing single bracket should be grey.
Works fine.
Single square brackets should be visible; the text that’s not a link shouldn’t be underlined; the external link should be displayed as usual.
Actual result
Works fine.
Works fine.
You can still see the opening double brackets for the internal link; the closing single bracket is black when it should be grey to match the opening bracket and to match the behaviour in examples 1 and 2.
Works fine.
Single square brackets not visible; text that isn’t a link is underlined; the external link is displayed as raw text, not in its live preview form.
Environment
SYSTEM INFO:
Obsidian version: v0.14.5
Installer version: v0.14.2
Operating system: #1 SMP Debian 5.15.15-1 (2022-01-18) 5.15.0-3-amd64
Login status: logged in
Catalyst license: insider
Insider build toggle: on
Live preview: on
Legacy editor: off
Base theme: light
Community theme: none
Snippets enabled: 0
Safe mode: on
Actual result / 5. Single square brackets not visible; text that isn’t a link is underlined; the external link is displayed as raw text, not in its live preview form.
Displays “link(/file.md)”, and opens a new file called “link”.
Environment
SYSTEM INFO:
Operating system: ios 15.6.1 (Apple iPhone)
Obsidian version: 1.4.3 (95)
API version: v1.1.16
Login status: not logged in
Live preview: on
Legacy editor: off
Base theme: dark
Community theme: none
Snippets enabled: 0
Restricted mode: on
RECOMMENDATIONS:
none
Additional information
Some things I have tried:
Inserting spaces like this [ [link] ](/file.md) . This simply displays the whole thing in plain text in the reading mode and the link doesn’t work at all.
Turning wikilinks back on. This doesn’t seem to change anything. I still see “link(/file.md)” in the reading mode, and it still opens a new note called “link”.
Respectfully I disagree. Single square brackets seems to be required by the current implementation in Obsidian, which prioritizes Wikilinks over original markdown links, but it is by no means a requirement for Markdown links in general.
So it does look like a bug to me. I started the discussion in the Help section initially instead of a bug report, because it was not obvious to me if there was a further setting I needed to click to get the standard behavior.
Standard markdown behavior would render the inner set of square brackets in the output, as shown in my last post. I am aware of what the original spec says - I want to see that second set of square brackets! That is what I would expect and how I like to use links. Obsidian does not do this even with Wikilinks disabled.
No. I’m also not testing with plugins and snippets off, tho, which I should do (tho I wouldn’t expect it to affect this). I’m testing on an iPad, which shouldn’t matter but it is a difference.
Oh wait, I see — looks like they work in Reading View. They don’t work in Live Preview.
Great. I work in source and read so hadn’t looked at live preview. Checking now, I see the links in live preview but they aren’t displayed as cleanly as in read mode.
Hopefully this all adds to the pot for the OP and developers.