Use case or problem
Currently note links have 2 killer features that are sometimes but not always aligned with each other:
- Create a clickable link to another note in your vault simply by typing
[[My Note Name]] - Create a link between 2 nodes in the Obsidian Graph.
Usually if a user wants one of these features, they also want the other. But not always.
Sometimes a user wants to have a clickable link to make navigation easier, but they do not want those two notes to be linked together in the graph because those two notes do not share that kind of relationship.
Currently, Obsidian doesn’t allow this. You either have both or neither. This is a problem because it forces us to choose between:
- No hyperlink for easy navigation
- A hyperlink, and a graph cluttered with unrelated views.
Proposed solution
We do not need to make a complicated new feature or syntax. We can simply use two syntaxes that we already use all the time.
- Note links like:
[[My Note Name]] - Markdown links like:
[text](https://www.myurl.com)
These two syntaxes could be combined to make something like this:
[text]([[My Note Name]])
Now, Obsidian would turn the text into a clickable hyperlink that navigates to another note, but it would NOT link the notes together in the Graph View, and it would NOT add it to the Linked Mentions list. (It would be added to the Unlinked Mentions list, though.)
Notion has a similar feature. You can embed a page directly into another page (which changes the note hierarchy) or you can link to a page (which adds a hyperlink but does not change the note hierarchy).
Current workaround (optional)
Use a markdown link with an Obsidian url. For example, instead of writing [text]([[My Note Name]]) you could write [text](obsidian://open?vault=My%20Vault&file=My%20File).
However, this is:
- far less readable
- doesn’t update when the note name changes
- doesn’t autocomplete, so you have to manually find the note, right-click and choose “Copy Obsidian URL”, then paste it into the Markdown link.