Third option to quickly create a link, by simply dragging and dropping one open note onto another?

From what I have seen so far, imo Obsidian seems to have very well thought through drag and drop philosophy.

I would like to describe something that seems like a natural extension of this philosophy to me.
(Which is a little bit bold, for someone who is as new to Obsidian as I am; please let me know you can think of a reason why this might not be a good idea.)

Let’s say I have two notes open, either next to each other, or on different tabs, and I want to create a link in one of them, that links to the other.

There are two standandard ways to do this, that work perfectly well:

  1. To type double square brackets, then start typing the name of the Note I want to link to (which I can read from the other file), and then choose it from the choices that pop up.

  2. Per drag and drop, if the name of the file I want to link to should be revealed in my folder hierarchy.

For the second method to work, the name needs to be revealed.
If it isn’t, there is a way to reveal it, by choosing “reveal file in navidation”.

—>

What if I could just skip this step, by Obsidian allowing me to simply grab the title of the note I want to link to, and drop it on the other file, at what ever place in the note where I want to link to it - just in the same way I can do it already if I grabbed the name from the folder hierarchy?

As far as I can see, this option of dropping one note over another is not used for anything else yet.

Are there any downsides to this, that I am not aware of?

Dragging and dropping a note arround is used to change from vertical to horizontal arrangement; so theoretically, someone who tries to do this might accidentally create a link.
But this is something they would immediately notice, plus the way Obsidian works it constantly signals in advance the expected outcome (with the colored Rectangle appearing, in the case of changing the arrangement, or the cursor moving along with my mouse curser to indicate where the link would get inserted).

The time / effort advantage would be minute, but since linking is such a basic operation in Obsidian, even minute time savers can add up.

Obviously this has a lot to do with personal preferences;
I, for one, love when I can simply use drag and drop instead of having to type; while for many people, it’s the exact opposite.
(Might have to do with the fact that I’m using a graphic’s tablet.)

1 Like