Option to sort backlinks by heading/block-ids

Use case or problem

When you want to be able to see the backlinks for specific headings and block ids by looking at the Backlinks of a note.

Proposed solution

Long story short, it would be very helpful to be able to sort the backlinks list by heading. I could see the list showing all headings in alphabetical order with all backlinks to them folded within. These folded lists of backlinks per heading could be sortable by the various options. Consequently, the “sort backlinks by headings” would have to be a separate toggle.

Another option would be to have a toggle for showing backlinks for the heading the cursor is within.

Current workaround

You can do a search for a link to the heading. Another option is to use the Strange New Worlds plugin.

Thanks!


For now I will include my original use case from 2020, but it is not necessary to understand this feature request.

In my workflow, I have notes whose purpose is to be used as elements within seqence. So, while note A is a single idea, its purpose is to be strung together with many other ideas. There are many cases of it being strung with a single note, but also many cases of it as part of a string of several notes. So to organize this, I have headings within A for the various other notes it has been strung together with. The headings only show the combination of this note with one other note.

For notes that have multiple ideas strung together, they link to each step in their sequence. So for example, note ABC would have links within to A#B, B#A, B#C, and C#B. Inside note A, there may be headings called AB, AC, AD, etc. Think of the letters as ideas. And within these headings, I keep a collection of all backlinks.

For example, the heading D within A might have a link to JADQZ, FTDAS, etc (any string that includes note A and D adjacent to eachother). Since this workflow is often done quickly and oftentimes away from the computer, I would like to not have to manually scan through the list of many backlinks and look for all that have those two ideas adjacent to each other, and copy the links into the corresponding heading. Especially because these are ideas not letters, and because I am limited by note name length, I cannot just order the titles of each idea within the sequence in the title for the longer strings of ideas. Even if I could, it would still be very difficult to hunt them down.

So instead, I summarize the string of ideas with a word or phrase that paraphrases the action or concept. So in these cases, with the current alphabetical and date sort, I would not even be able to quickly pick out, for example, backlinks for AD, even if they were the first part of the sequence of this particular note. I know this sounds confusing, and I would be happy to clarify with actual examples, but figured I would try this in case it did the trick.

10 Likes

+1 for this idea.

I think it would be really neat to be able to separate backlinks by link/heading/block-id.

3 Likes