Quickly link selected text to notes

I’m having a lot of trouble finding a way to quickly link a selected text to another note. e.g:
I am going to the [beach](East Coast Beach) on Friday!)

What I’m trying to do

What I want: select beach > press ctrl-K > start typing name of note, choose from a drop down list of notes, same way as typing [[

As of now, selecting the text and pressing ctrl-K does not recognize existing notes.

Things I have tried

What I have been doing:
press [[ to get a drop down of notes > chose note to link > get:
[[East Coast Beach]]
delete the set of square brackets and change to normal brackets → (East Coast Beach)
now add text in one set of square brackets [beach]
get: [beach](East Coast Beach)

I checked some other forum posts but answers were not satisfactory as none solve the problem
link and link

Ideally this should be a default feature, and not done through plugins.

Let me know if I’m fighting a losing battle or is there a way?? Thanks! :pray:

(this is just a simplified example! i come across this tedious task all the time!)

If you deactivate Settings > Files and links > “Use wikilinks”, then typing the double brackets and choosing a suggestion will produce the Markdown link format you want.

Thanks! I just tried it but it still doesn’t really work.

I may have not been clear enough, I’m not worried about if it’s wikilink or markdown style. What I want is to very quickly select text and link, with no friction.

My workflow is to write write write, and later go back, review the text, select parts and start linking to notes. ctrl-K or [[ doesn’t matter, as long as I could get an immediate auto-complete.

I actually prefer Wikilink format for its readability and simplicity, also creating unlinked mentions is super useful. But for quickly linking text, it doesn’t work well. I can select a text, type [[ then use the cursor to start of text, type the pipe | , use cursor again to go left of pipe, then i can finally type down a note with autocomplete. It’s this friction I want to avoid. Any ideas?

How does the Templater approach in the comments of the first link not work for you?

There may be a plugin for what you want, but I’m not sure. I know there’s one for pasting URLs into text, which isn’t quite the same thing.

As far as I know there isn’t a built in way. Someone would need to post a feature request for that, if one doesn’t already exist.