Freelinking

yes… but its far more obscure, and less user friendly… a simple plugin/setting that instead of finding the unlinked mentions tab in the sidebar, shows greyed out square brackets instead of permanent ones

Here’s a trivial implementation of this feature:

I’ve been looking for an alternative to VoodooPad recently and Obsidian seems promising, but the lack of this feature has been a big no-go, so I made one myself. I hacked this together in two days, so it’s rough, but it works.

This only updates the document you’re currently viewing as maintaining a state over all files in the vault was a performance nightmare. With ~10,000 files in the vault, parsing a long open file for mentions of all of them takes about 150ms. Not great, but I can live with it for now.

Maybe I can improve on this in the future after I learn bit more about how Obsidian’s internals work.

3 Likes

Yes, this exactly what is needed in Obsidian, it will make one discover new relationships between notes. Well done!