I would like to be able to query by links. Both incoming and outgoing if you can.
But specifically I am using some links as tags, for example “[[moscow]]”, therefore I want to find all documents that have “[[moscow]]”. But simply line:“[[moscow]]” does not always work, because sometimes it’s “[[moscow|Москву]]”. There are some arcane regexes mentioned above, but can you maybe please grant us this simple request of letting us query by inlinks and outlinks? Just like we can query by tags.
I’ve quit Evernote because they wouldn’t let me have simple queries. Obsidian is better, but this request is going for years already, this is some fundamental thing, I don’t see how you don’t make it top priority feature.
I find it very strange that this can’t be done considering how quintessential of a function links are in Obsidian. Even [[link]] can’t be searched.
Why I would like this:
I’m a heavy user of Canvas. I would like to be able to drag and drop notes with the link [[Ethics]] to a Canvas, which would be easy if I could have them displayed in the search pane.
Dragging notes from the [[Ethics]] backlink pane to the Canvas works, but it’s tedious because every time I’ve dragged a note into the Canvas, the Canvas becomes the active note and the backlink pane clears. It also only allows dragging one note at a time, because you can’t select multiple notes and then drag them.
In this case, being able to search for [[Ethics]] or link:ethics and drag notes from the search results would be a lot easier. Although you can’t select and drag multiple notes there either, the results would at least remain visible even when the Canvas file is active, which isn’t the case for the [[Ethics]] backlink pane.
I’d like to make my case about link searching as well: in my view, [[tags]] are superior (for my use-case) to tags in nearly every way. They create strong connections, allow for frictionless creation of hierarchies within the vault, and hub pages are automatically linked to every page that mentions them.
The only downside is that you can’t search them precisely: suppose I write a daily journal, and I wish to know when I did something [[social]]. Now the search algorithm will show uses of the word “social” as well, which might as well be in an essay about social isolation. With tags, I lose the tags-as-hub-page feature, and gain only the precise filterability.
With link searching and link filtering, it would be an easy choice to use links for everything- it would simply be better. Clear connections and automatic hubs, perfect filtering of concepts and topics.
Ah, there goes my entire complaint. I’d only heard people only tell me “you’ve come upon the downsides of linking” and didn’t realise it was that simple. My bad. Problems of being new to something and still unaware of all the features.
Regular expressions work also. /\[\[foobar.*?(\]\]|\|)/ finds all links starting with foobar, including links that have a costum display text (aka alias).
