Fuzzy Searching for Unlinked Mentions

I really like underscores. Like, maybe a little too much. Pretty much the only thing I like more than underscores, is how I can use them to get rid of stupid spaces in filenames. There are ton of reasons for and against this method of file naming, but here we are.

I think a small-scope fuzzy match for unlinked references will help me, and people with my predilection, better able to see connections between their notes.

To be clear, I’m not looking for a full fuzzy match search (although, if done right, would be VERY cool), I’m just looking for unlinked mentions that include underscores (and possibly also dashes) as a replacement for spaces, and maybe include variations where punctuation is missing.

For example: if I had a note named underscores_and_why_theyre_amazballs.md I would like to see an unlinked mention if, in another note, I say something like "I just found a title for my new book: “Underscores, and Why They’re Amazballs!”

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I think this would also be helpful more generally if for example you can’t remember exactly the format of what you wrote at some point in the past, but you’ve got some of the words

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Agreed. Moreover unlinked mentions seems to need a full-text match, rather than partial.

If I have a note named after a person - John Smith - unlinked mentions should pick it up if I just say Smith, as I would in many notes. “In his book, Smith says xyz”

Not sure how you actually implement it without returning too many false positives (especially if a note’s name has multiple words/a sentence), but needing to type the EXACT match for any unlinked notes to show up seems to severely limit the utility of this function.

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Another one issue: there are languages, which have different suffixes for the same word. For example in Russian the words ‘Россией’, ‘Россию’, ‘России’ are the different cases of the same word ‘Россия’ (‘Russia’). So, partially matched words may be useful when searching for Unlinked Mentions.

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This would help a lot in completing my concept bank (a sort of personal wiki)!

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I would really like to see this get implemented for dealing with zettelkasten IDs

for example I have the note “202007171623 Knowledge Cycle”, which won’t ever appear in unmentioned backlinks because in other notes I only say “knowledge cycle”.

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Agreed. I think this would be great if addressed. It is causing considerable confusion for me as prepending Zettelkasten IDs will lead to loss of unlinked mentions in obsidian while not adding Zk IDs to the title would make it vendor dependent (In this case Obsidian) since Obsidian does provide the feature to automatically change all mentions of the filename if the original filename is changed but outside Obsidian, it can break a lot of links when filenames are changed.

Regarding this feature request. Right now the search for unlinked mention is partially fuzzy.
If you have a note called cat, and the word cats in another note, you will get a match.

Treating - as is further fuzzyfication that I am not sure is universally agread upon.

@lizardmenfromspace alias is something to think about.

I also would like to stress that there is a sizable portion of our users who do NOT like the current fuzzy searching for unlinked mentions and would like to have exact\whole word search (like Roam does) plus maybe a plugin to handle plurals or synonyms.

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same for me

We moved to exact\whole word matching in 0.8.4/5. Fuzzy/Plural/Synonyms/Alias matching should be implemented as a plugin at some point in the future.

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