I am wanting to find a way to create true bidirectional or two-way links between notes without having to create separate links from A to B and then from B to A. The way that Obsidian make “backlinks” seems clunky and inefficient, at least for my workflow. I would like to be able to create a link from A to B and have Obsidian automatically make a “real” link–not a “backlink”–from B to A.
Things I have tried
Help docs only talk about creating links one way links with “backlinks.” I can’t find any forum mentions to what I am looking for, except for one mention in “No backlinks for two-way links” within the Bug graveyard.
A clickable backlink in the text of the target note requires editing that target note. I am not sure whether it would be a good idea to let the software automatically edit your target note as soon as you create a link. Where should it include the link? What display text should it use?
If it would be sufficient to have the software add a clickable title to the source note in a standard location, e.g. on the very first line or the very last line, then indeed that could be an idea for a community plugin.
Speaking for myself, a minimum useful change would be for backlinks to be shown in a pane at the bottom of the editing window, instead of something I have to click into.
What would be even better is if links that are meant to map relationships and don’t need to be embedded inside of copy had their own standard, designated space in the document. This way links added manually to the focused document would not need to be treated differently from links added automatically to the related documented.
I would also accept the automated links being appended to the end of the document, or to have some sort of anchor element indicating where they should go if more are added.
So it’s not good enough to have it in the right side pane?
If you want to, you could add a query at the bottom of your page to list the backlinks, but my preference is to just use the backlinks pane when I want to see them.
And to me I wouldn’t want an different note to be updated when I add a link to it in the current file. But as had been said, it could surely be done by a custom plugin.
Yeah, the problem is that I’m hopping between many notes, often looking at the graph, with another window to the side for reference, and there’s just not a lot of space for that many panes.
I didn’t know a query would make that possible! I think that would suit my needs if I could add that to a template.