Inline “#tagging” with [[links]]

Knowledge management
1

While I very much like the idea of mainly using links as “tags” and tags really just as indicators of status, I have not yet found a satisfactory solutions for inline “tagging” with links in cases where the links are not part of the actual text, eg. when with “real” tags I’d append them to a headline or bullet point etc. like this:

# Some headline #tag1 #tag2 #tag3

Form some reason I don’t like just to append links:

# Some headline [[link 1]] [[link 2]] [[link 3]]

I’ve exprimented with something like

# Some headline ([[link 1]], [[link 2]], [[link 3]])

but found it not to be ideal with more and longer links. Instead I’m now using a Logseq-inspired approach to denote the “tag character” of the links:

# Some headline #[[link 1]] #[[link 2]] #[[link 3]]

Still, this feels like a workaround and not entirely satisfactory. So I’m simply curious: How do other people (who—largely—prefer links to tag) solve that?

PS: I guess for the ideal solution for me would be the actual approach Logseq has where tags simply are different visual representations of links and where block metadata can be added to every block/paragraph/bullet point like

- Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit
  tags:: [[link 1]] [[link 2]] [[link 3]]

so that blocks can be tagged while keeping the tags out of the way.

But here we are: That’s not how Obsidian does it. :man_shrugging:t3::relieved:

1 Like
2

I moved from Logseq to Obsidian because I couldn’t get on with tags as pages and the auto-creation of pages from properties, though some of the nightmares can be disabled. I know others who went the other way and love Logseq’s data mapping of every line into a block, inherited properties and complex queries.

I like tags for status and top-level categorisation. Too many tags can get out of hand quickly but it’s not so bad with hierarchical tags. I use value: name properties in the front matter and value:: name properties (used by dataview) but I don’t add them to heading lines.

I hope you find a way to have a friction-free way of doing what you want. It’s the underlying design philosophy of the two programs that give them the pros and cons.

2 Likes
3

If you want your tag-links hidden (as suggested by the last part of your post), you could put them in comments.

- Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit %% [[link 1]] [[link 2]] [[link 3]] %%

Actually that only hides them in Reading View. I don’t know how Logseq presents what you showed, so maybe that’s OK.

1 Like
4

Interesting idea, I’ll check it out—thanks! :+1:t3:

Update: Hides them very completely, indeed, though in reading view (and looks cluttered in editing mode). :upside_down_face:

The Logseq approach mentioned in the PS looks like this:

image
image1658×348 112 KB

It is clear to me, though, I won’t be able replicate that in Obsidian. :innocent:

Just curious how other people might handle this.

5

If you want them on the next line, you can add a break <br> at the end of the paragraph and I think search previews will show the paragraph when you search the tag. If you enable Settings > Editor > Strict Line Breaks, you can use the less obtrusive Markdown syntax of 2 or more spaces at the end of the line instead of <br>.

1 Like
6

Yes, that’s something I’ve tried, too. It doesn’t really work with headers, though, and in bullet lists it seemed to “break” a lot when moving stuff around.

(Thanks anyway, I really do appreciate the suggestion!)

7

So far the best solution I’ve found myself is simply to try and “organically” include the “tag links” in the text instead, by the way. Sometimes that probably leads to fewer links, but that might not be a downside per se.

8

Another possibility - tag with backlinks. For that, you need a convenient way to add/remove a link to the currently edited file in a ‘status note’ which is just another markdown note. Basically use the same method for storing meta-information about both markdown and non-markdown files.