Current behavior:
Obsidian 1.8.9 introduced a new “Insert footnote” command that facilitates writing footnotes. But currently it uses number as footnote identifier. Paragraph revisions and unexpected footnote insertions often disrupt numerical footnote order. Despite numerical order in reading mode, footnote ordering in editing mode disrupts user workflow and makes them hard to follow.
Proposed behavior:
To address the user confusion arising from unordered numbered footnotes, we might consider using unique, random identifiers for footnotes instead of sequential integers. This way, users would naturally focus on recognizing each footnote by its distinct identifier, which better reflects the true purpose of a footnote marker – simply to identify, not to impose a numerical order.
Additional considerations:
Since code for generating unique random identifiers already exists within the codebase for block identifiers, implementing this for footnotes should be straightforward by reusing the existing code.