List the current note's outgoing links in the 'links pane' (forward links)

You mis-read my feature request. Would you please re-open it? I’ll try to edit it for clarity and maybe add a mock-up.

The request is to add additional content to the ‘links pane’ that currently lists linked and unlinked mentions in a sortable list. The request is to add something like “Outgoing links” to that pane, which lists all the outgoing links from the current note.

+1 for this feature. For long notes, would be nice to see everything that it links TO.

For the graph, I could see arrows getting pretty unusable when you have lots of things linking to a single note. I think a better solution 3 different colors in the graph - a separate color for backlink, forwardlink, and one color for forward+backward link.

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I think using different colours is a great solution, alternatively this could be something that you can only ‘see’ when graph view is zoomed in enough, so that the colours/arrows aren’t always present

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+1 - This would be great! Ideally, there would be a list of outgoing “linked mentions” as well as (optionally) a list of outgoing “unlinked mentions”.

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That’s a cool idea! I’d suggest creating a specific feature request for it and linking to & from here. It’s a distinct idea and worth requesting.

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I’ve been thinking about the “unlinked mentions” bit for a while, and conceptually I really, really like the idea - I labelled it in my head as “outgoing unlinked mentions” . It’s the list of all of the notes that might possibly be related to the note you’re looking at right now. Having that will let you identify linkages between notes that otherwise you might miss (especially in large vaults), and that would be awesome! :partying_face:

So I started looking at it seriously to build out a plugin, and then got stuck on these points:

  1. if all your other notes are one word, then every word in the current note could be another note (especially the nouns). That could create a huge number of “outgoing unlinked mentions”, which might drown out the useful connections

  2. computationally, you would do this by making a list of all the other notes in the vault (including any aliases for notes) and then searching your current note for any of those names. Not insurmountable, but also not necessarily practical in a large vault either.

  3. Additionally, doing that kind of search this means only an exact match would show up in your “outgoing unlinked mentions”. That could mean you’d miss things (and would definitely not work at all if you’re using ZK prefixes).

  4. Because of the previous points, you’d also want to search for any occurrence of a word in the name of other notes in your note. For example, if I have a note called “Accessibility is important to usability” in my vault, and in the current note I’ve written the phase “A key point in uptake is usability…”, then there’s a good chance I do want to make an explicit link on the word “usability” there. But if I’ve written “It’s important to note …” then I don’t care, and I don’t want to be bothered with an “outgoing unlinked mention”. Problem is, how does Obsidian know the difference?

  5. Following from 4, imagine I have a note that has three phrases in different places:

    • “A key point in uptake is usability …”
    • “It’s important to note …”
    • Accessibility is a component of …”

    Then I have three possible outgoing links (two of which might actually be real and useful to make). But if there’s also other notes in the vault with names of “Usability”, “Accessibility”, and “Good usability improves uptake” then I’ve got 5 possible outgoing unlinked mentions. How do I display that in a list though? They’re highly specific to the context and placement of the text in the note, especially if you image there are one or more other notes in the vault that have the words “key point”, “uptake” and “component” in their names as well…

Thoughts and feedback on this, am I missing something that makes it simpler than I think it is? (and sorry for the wall of text, but I couldn’t explain it in fewer words :wink: )

Related (both my posts):

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Okay. My initial thought was that, just as the current backlinks pane contains both a list of linked mentions and a list of unlinked mentions, it would make sense for the proposed outgoing links pane to have a similar organization. But I’m happy to create a separate feature request. (Or perhaps it’s a plugin request, as per ShaneNZ’s post.)

That’s fantastic news that you’ve been thinking of building a plugin for this! For now, I went ahead and created a separate feature request for this, particularly in light of dsteinbock’s preference to keep the feature requests distinct, but a plugin would be a great solution.

You raise some great questions about how to implement the idea. I’ll plan to respond to those points on the separate feature request thread.

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+1.

Use case: when I write a paper I have a file with an outline/notes, pointing in each section to the relevant literature notes. I have the graph view open to navigate to those notes quickly, but it would be really nice to have a list of them – just like on the “backlinks” pane.

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Maybe it is possible to achieve the same effect by some CSS snippet which hides all text and embeds except the links.
Alternatively the CSS snippet can just make links to non-existent pages within text larger font size and/or distinct text background instead of current dull text color so you can easily spot such links in context when scrolling the page in preview mode.

Looking for this, especially for block link. I see a block-id, but sometimes forget where it’s going. is it still important or not.

This would be a great add (feature) for me as well. It would be very useful in my workflow.

Okay so I’ve got this note - it’s a fleeting note, and its new, so there aren’t going to be any backlinks to it. The backlinks panel is empty. What if there were a “forward links” panel, where it showed the first couple lines of each page (excluding YAML)? So imagine something that would look like the search results for “all pages linked from the page I’m working on.”

Then I could have a dynamic panel that’s helpful for me as I’m writing

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+1.

Would love to have this feature. Are there currently no plugins which do this?

@isle9 no plugins that I’m aware of, ages ago I was considering it but never got to it - life took over :slight_smile: There is a feature request open for it, Display a list of current note's outgoing unlinked mentions (candidate forward links) maybe you and @roberthaisfield might consider adding a vote for it if you haven’t already? Like you both I’d love the feature to be present in Obsidian.

@ShaneNZ the other FR you listed is similar but different.
This FR is about alredy linked pages. That FR is about potential new links.

Both are on the roadmap as a separate pane showing forward/outgoing links.

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True, I’ve been thinking about them as “together” in the same way that linked/unlinked mentions are together in a pane. Good clarification, thanks.

:heart: :pray: :partying_face:

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FWIW, the local graph shows this visually. Outward arrows from the current note and incoming arrows to the current note. For me, the visual is much more useful than separate lists. It enables me to work in the realm(s) in and around the current thought or essay. Links to notes not yet created are dull, existing notes are highlighted, and the font size of the note names is the perfect size to analyze the world(s) around this note. It’s addictive, actually:)

This FR will be implemented in 0.12.4

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