Shortcut to add backlinks (and context) to the current note

One of my standard workflows is, when adding a new note, to link to it from other notes. For instance:

  • I want to create a new note about “Bernie Sanders’ Primary Defeat”
  • I want this to be linked to from “Democratic Party”, “Western Left”, “Bernie Sanders”

In Tiddlywiki (which I used to use) this could be done by adding the other notes as “tags” (though I recognise this is not the concept of tagging used in Obsidian or in most editors) - so here I would just write “[[Democratic Party]] [[Western Left]] [[Bernie Sanders]]” in the tag field. Then the next time I open “Democratic Party”, a link to this note would be available at the bottom of the file.

In Obsidian, though, to do this I have to open the other note first, add the link, and then return to my original note.

This is sufficiently important for me that I’ve written a shell script to allow me to do this faster (and hooked it into Obsidian as a “default app” so I can invoke it with a shortcut). The script also allows me to insert a few words of context before the link, and it’ll then stick the text and the link into the other note while I continue to work on this one.

Is there a chance this could be added in as a feature?

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this is so neat. you got my +1!

would you be willing to share the script?

I’m really sorry it’s taken me so long to get back on this - I notice someone else has also posted a similar feature request, here.

I’ll post my script later today. The thing is that my use case has a lot of edge cases because I’ve imported my notes from my own earlier system, so I eventually had to rewrite the script in Python to make it work properly. It’s working now, but I’m not sure how helpful it’ll be to others.

Really hoping the Obsidian developers will consider this :smile:.

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I’d love for the option to be able to automatically link back a bi- directional link to the current page.

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Not having this option is really starting to impact my workflow, including my ability to use the LYT Kit (now downloadable!)

If we can have the option to

“automatically link back a bi- directional link to the current page”

as an option we can switch on and off, I think that would suffice. Otherwise, currently I get lost in my notes (and not in a good way) as I forget to link back to the original page where the thought for the new page came about.

This is closely related to Extract Note / Refactor. One could write the text in the current note, and refactoring would imply selecting the relevant text and appending it to an existing note instead of creating a new one.

I edited the title to (hopefully) make it a bit clearer and easier to search.

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+1 from me.

I currently do this by hand. I would use it like the “Links to this note” section at the end of each note like Andy does with his notes.

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Adding my +1 as well. I wonder if there have been any developments in the past months?

+1 for sure

There’s a community plugin for this which I’ve been using for a long time now.

Can you share which plugin is this?

If I understand correctly what you want to do, then this should work for you: https://github.com/mrjackphil/obsidian-crosslink-between-notes

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