Okay, this may not be the ultimate linking tool, but I think this is a pretty cool idea.
So, you might be familiar with people-linking in Obsidian. There’s a plugin for it.
Type the @ symbol and a modal with come up suggesting a ‘person’ to link to. If the person you’re looking for doesn’t exist, it will let you create one also. You can see the plug-in in action here.
This plug-in draws from a preconfigured folder that determines which files are “people”. Well, what if we could have this plug-in configured for multiple folders? And link not only to people, but to locations, topics, ideas, and other concepts, depending on the folder?
But How Would this Work?
Well, like typing the @ symbol triggers the people modal, we could configure other symbols to bring up a modal for a different folder. Maybe we have a Drafts folder. We could configure it so that typing ~[[ triggers the Drafts folder. And maybe ^[[ triggers a Locations folder. The [[s and the preceding characters used to bring up the modal are removed once a link is selected, then the link is inserted in its place.
Simply typing on without selecting a link will not delete anything, but treat the trigger characters as part of the normal text, and the modal will disappear.
But…I Don’t Exactly Use Folders.
Well, what if this plug-in also supported dataview queries or tags or metadata that could be used to determine which files are included in each modal pop-up? This would solve everything!