2 years ago note composer was introduced in Obsidian after this thread (Merge notes and update backlinks) from the forum.
However, it still lacks one feature suggested in the thread - to leave the original name of the merged note as an alias whenever it is refereced.
Imagine merging [[machine intelligence]] into [[AI]]. Now all references are just [[AI]], [[AI]] and [[AI]]. But I’d rather have [[AI|Machine intelligence]] whenever the old file was mentioned.
I’d prefer to have this as an option when merging — I can imagine choosing differently depending on the note.
Have you checked the Obsidian42 Text Transporter plugin? It brings you closer to what you want sending block embeds to other files or copying blocks as aliases to be pasted into target files. Check it out, it might be just what you need 
Yes, this is simple and basic option that ought to be there when merging notes … can’t believe that they left this out.
And even weirder is that this request has so few likes…
I’ll add a like for this proposal.
Here’s my use-case.
I’ve got a folder of notes representing journal articles and another folder of notes representing people/authors (most of them automatically generated), with links between them. But often the same author will show up with different names in different articles — say “Jesse Smith” and “Jesse A. Smith” or “Jesse Smith-Zhang”. I’d like to easily merge the different author notes into one so that any link-click inside an article note will end up at the same person, but also not obliterate the way the article note originally spelled the author’s name — 'cause that’s often significant.
Hmm. Actually, for my specific setup, Note Composer kind of already does this — though it does something else strange.
My original links in an article note look like
[[People/Smith, Jesse A.|Jesse A. Smith]].If I then go and merge the note Smith, Jesse A. into the note Smith, Jesse, the link on the article page has turned into
[[Smith, Jesse|Jesse A. Smith]]So the merge has preserved the original display text, but it also gets rid of the folder in the link. I can actually live with that.
Is there a solution for this? As in a plugin or a setting that was introduced with updates after the original post?
Adding this message as a reminder that this is a simple, but valuable feature.
I agree, just merged some notes and even expected this to be the default behavior
+1 for this please!
Great idea! +1 from me too. I’d like to have this as a toggle in settings though.