Render text in backlinks, search results, and queries instead of showing raw markdown (reading mode rendering)

[jeroen]

Sounds sensible. Should it be renamed to ‘Use selected mode for search results and backlinks’ or something?

[jmsv]

+1 on this, would make backlinks a lot friendlier

[GLight]

For anyone who is interested in the topic of “rendering the search result”, you may have a look at and have a try of the beta plugin introduced here.

Rendering the markdown in the query/search results

Let’s go to the topic directly. The built-in query and research function is very powerful for text searching. However, the search results returned are just plain texts. And I think many people would prefer a result looks similar to the live preview mode. And I kept wondering why there is no such a core plugin or 3-rd party plugin that can do this. Accidentally, I red this post and found that there is a plugin, but is experimental, that can do this job: A very cool example of the use case is…

The author of this plugin had finished the part of rendering the query command resul and search panel result. The only think that is left is the rendering of the backlink result. And a feature request had been proposed to the author of the plugin for 3 months, but no further reply on if from the author.

I’m not the author of the plugin and not familiar with the TS/JS, so if any one who is familiar with the TS/JS may have a look at the code on github, and see if you can work it out.

Also, the developer of Obsidian may have a look at of the code as well. I think this feature could be a core plugin.

[GLight]

I just realized that the author of the plugin(@NothingIsLost ) is also here. ：）

[GLight]

query-control plugin 0.4.0 works fine with Obsidian 0.15.2.

thank you! @NothingIsLost

[robertsmith]

Thanks @GLight for the reference.

And thanks @NothingIsLost for the plugin

[efemkay]

just want to update this thread that NIL already updated the plugin to 0.5.0 with markdown render support for backlinks. truly awesome.

[GLight]

That’s great news.
Currently, I use a rendered query command to replace the built-in backlink display in the note.

[memetic_contagion]

currently linked mentions is pure unaltered text, if the note is aliased it shows the full name, followed by the alias, which makes it a bit hard to read if it’s a super long title. example:

it would be useful to only display the alias.

PS. it would also be useful to render linked mentions in reading view, thus rendering mathjax correctly, along with the aliases, but that may be more difficult than required.

[dsteinbock]

+1

This Feature Request is from May 2020! Now that we’ve reached the beauty of Obsidian v1.0, raw markdown in backlinks is a glaringly unpolished part of the UI.

Rendering the markdown in search results & queries should follow close behind.

From a related FR:

@syncretizm

The current display of backlinks (linked/unlinked mentions) in Live Preview makes it unaesthetic, displeasing to use and frictional. Case in point: https://twitter.com/houshuang/status/1481316063346405381

[d3go]

+1

hope this can get prioritized

[mike555]

+1
I submitted a similar request here a few months back:

Provide ability to render md (e.g. images and links) in the Mentions area

Looks like this feature request is also the same: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/display-search-results-and-backlinks-in-reading-mode/195

[Targofendi]

Ah, this, so much this! One of my big use cases of Obsidian is tracking documents on key projects, and of course, these always have external hyperlinks.

So my backlinks look like

• Some [doc](http://example.com/SuperDuperCrazyInsaneLongDocsURLThatTakesUpAllTheSpace

…and it makes it incredibly challenging to scan my backlinks, making them much less useful

[collective]

+1 this would be an amazing UX improvement that would encourage more usage of the backlinks feature

[jblanc]

+1
Having unrendered markdown show up in query results and backlinks (or in any context) when everything else is a live preview is … jarring.

I’ve got external links to documents with long URLs that make the search result less useful due to the clutter.

A query for task-todo that returns unrendered checkboxes is … jarring.

[ryadaj]

Use case or problem

For people like me who are mildly dyslexic and struggle to remedy this with a combination of eye-friendly colour schemes, the search results are quite difficult to read due to the markdown formatting (source code?).

Proposed solution

Offer a WYSIWYG search results visualization. I am not a technical person, so I appreciate that this would likely be very challenging.

Current workaround (optional)

I am using @TfTHacker's new plugin [Strange New Worlds](https://github.com/TfTHacker/obsidian42-strange-new-worlds) which renders results in a reading view format. In the attached image, you can see that the plugin returns, in the right sidebar, a list of notes which include a link to the note called `Living Well` and the results are rendered in reading view, so that even where an alias has been used to link to this note, it renders as desired.

EDIT: Replaced screenshot with one that shows the core search results on the left and the plugin results on the right.

Related feature requests (optional)

Make nested lists/sub-lists in search results less difficult to read

Use case or problem When using the native search feature, sub-lists lists can create a feeling of visual clutter when clicking `Show More Context` but additional context is often required for sense-making. This is compounded by additional formatting characters, such as `*` and `[[ ]]`, and made even more challenging for those with dyslexia. When the nested list contains more text and levels than I've included in this example from a clean vault, it makes for quite a messy search result Propose…

WYSIWYG editor quirks: improve search result highlighting

Problem After following a backlink or search result a page is open and the match is highlighted in it. So far so good. But the highlighted area is rendered as markdown source code, which doesn’t look nice and is somewhat distracting. Steps to reproduce: Open a page with backlinks Follow a backlink Look how the match turns to source code [[..]] Proposed solution The rendering of the match shouldn’t be changed except for the highlighting.

[obsequious]

Check out the Query Control plugin. You may need to use BRAT to install the beta

[sanhuesoft]

+1 to this

[JayKim]

+1

It is very useful to tag certain equations but in the search results they are hard to identify because mathjax is not rendered.

[johw]

I have the query control plugin installed and I like it a lot but the backlinks are often from the previous page when navigating your vault. Both in live preview as is source view.

Just clicking on the linked references header (closing and opening it again) solves it but it is an issue as I sometimes forget to do that and the wrong references are shown.