Support internal links to work in reference-style links

[jbeder]

Use case or problem

Allow internal links to work as reference links (i.e., the Markdown link style where you write [link text][link-id] and [link-id]: the/url).

Proposed solution

[notes][1]

[1]: Notes.md

should work exactly the same as

[notes](Notes.md)

Current workaround (optional)

You can write these as a URL (see, e.g., here).

Related feature requests (optional)

Related bug report:

Internal links don't work as reference links

Steps to reproduce Create a reference link to an internal file, e.g.: [notes][1] [1]: Notes.md Expected result I’d expect the link to look the same as if I wrote [notes](Notes.md) which is to say, like a regular link, and if I click on it, it should open the Notes.md file. Actual result It produces a link that has a “box with an arrow” next to it (I think this symbolizes an external link?), and when I click on it, it brings up a dialog saying "Are you sure you want to open this link? L…

[gledos]

I had the same problem, hope Obsidian will consider this feature.

[gledos]

another similar post:

Problem with link labels (internal links)

Hi, I’m trying to improve the readability of my note and I thought to use the markdown link system (instead of wikilinks) without enter the link right in the middle of the text but defining a label at the and of my note, like this: Here I want to enter a [link][] to a file. [link]: /path/of/the/file.md I think this is the right markdown syntax, but when I click on the link Obsidian opens my browser using it as an external link. I also used Vs Code to edit and view the note and the link work…

Hope to solve this problem one day.

[sstallion]

I just ran into this myself and had a bug report rejected since this feature request already existed.

I’m not sure I agree with treating this as a feature request; not supporting reference-style links with URLs that work in other contexts should be treated as a bug as Obsidian is not correctly handling Markdown (for reference, see Basic Syntax | Markdown Guide).

CC: @ariehen @WhiteNoise

[chrfin]

I agree. This lack of support for standard markdown is the only thing preventing me from switching to Obsidian, as it doesn’t work with my existing notes. Nor would I even want to migrate them given the absence of this feature, since the whole point of that link style is that you don’t have to put long links in the middle of the text, possibly many times. It’s unfortunately a deal breaker for me, which is a real shame.

Obsidian claims to support markdown, but it doesn’t actually work. Clearly a bug.

[Mummel]

This should indeed be considered a bug.

A primary feature of Markdown syntax is its readability. Inline links suck for readability, meanwhile Obsidian’s way of making them (relatively) human-readable doesn’t conform to “proper” (Common) Markdown syntax at all and goes directly against the goal of making your vault portable and interoperable. …And yet Obsidian DOES support footnotes which aren’t part of the standard spec at all. What the heck?

[olivr70]

link definitions are a very important feature of markdown when working on long documents.

This is just a notation, and user expectation is that using link definitions will provide exactly the same behavior as inline links. This is just a way to write the link elsewhere. It took me a quite a while of testing (even going back to CommonMark spec) to discover that in Obsidian link destinations were handled differently in both cases.

I also consider it to be more a bug, as it is provides an unexpected and systematicaly useless result (broken links are generated)

PLease add support to it, with full alignement on inline links, with support for images and embedding notes or part of notes