Below I will first describe my workflow, then my plugin suggestion will make more sense. Sorry for the length.
Doing creative work I have gotten in the habit of going through large lists of ideas and inspirations that I have created individual notes for. I call these base nodes. I also create separate nodes, I call shared nodes. These are categories that the various base nodes fit into.
I link each base node to the various shared notes that applies to them. This is a step where I try to be creative and fit the base nodes into shared nodes that may not be immediately obvious, but makes sense in some unique way that I may want to explore later on.
Next, I fill each shared node with links to all the base nodes that are linked to it. This process is done using screenshots and character recognition from the backlinks pane, appending brackets. AutoHotkey definitely helps speed this up somewhat.
My next step is to make sure Windows searches the content of markdown files. I proceed to do individual searches for the combination of every shared node (literally 5000 searches in my current project, since I have a few over 100 shared nodes). By duplicating and reversing order, I will end up with around 10,000, since combo of shared node A and shared node B are equal. However, in reality, some combinations do not return any results, so the number will definitely be less.
After each search I select all the files and copy them into a folder named with the two shared node titles. I then run the following at the command line with path being the path to this folder:
for %a in (“path*”) do @echo %~na
This returns a list of the names of all base nodes in the folder from above. I then paste this into a spreadsheet and append [[ before and ]] after each item. If I hadn’t found Ditto and recently been introduced to Autohotkey on this forum, this all would be unbearable. Finally, I paste this list of links into a note, I call a hub.
Finally, I combine all of theses lists of links into one note that has a list of the shared nodes at the highest level. Then, folded within each shared node item is a sub-list of shared nodes. And finally, within each of those, is the content of the corresponding hub, which matches both of its superior categories. Of course, this means that the list of all A-B nodes are shown in both A-B and B-A. In addition to the sub-list of shared nodes, I have a raw category which has all base nodes of its superior category folded within.
I have also gotten In the habit of arranging the sub-lists outside of Obsidian in order of those with the most links (usually the folders largest files sizes per folder) to those with the least. I screenshot these arrangements and use them as a reference to know where most of the action is.
I know all of this probably seems like a huge waste of time, because Obsidian provides almost this same functionality with a quick search. My problem is that a search requires work and cannot be copied. The same is true for backlinks. When I am finding unique connections between ideas of similar categories (in this case 2 similar categories), I don’t want to be bogged down with busy work. I’d rather get it done ahead of time.
The goal of all of this is to compartmentalize my creative process, freeing up my mind. With these lists, I can have smaller groupings (as opposed to some of my shared nodes which have upwards of 300) of base node ideas that I can begin to quickly formulate connections between, and later remove the Super-Comp note from vault or just comment it out. And the point for me is not necessarily just to get similar items nearby, but to get similar items nearby and find interesting connections between them through the shared concepts of the two categories. I like working on a solid note rather than just referring to backlink and search lists.
A plug-in that would accomplish all of this automatically for 2, 3, or even 4 matching links would be a godsend. This would be especially true if the Super-Comp it created would have an ability to update and retroactively add the notes to the proper lists based on base nodes having new links to shared nodes added.
Currently if I want to further narrow down, I can either just do a search for those 3 terms and go through the whole process, or just combine copies of these created folders and isolate the duplicates, and finally print this list of links and paste into Obsidian.
I know this was a lot to put out there, but wanted to share it in full so that the desire for this plugin would be fully understood.
Thanks for the patience. Be well.