Important Note
Hello everyone, I searched the feature request forum but didn’t find an existing top-level feature request for this, so I’m posting this. If there is one I missed, apologies - please reply with a link!
Proposed feature
When I click on a non-existent node in the graph, Obsidian creates a new node. It also automatically saves that node (read: its file), but I’d prefer if the file was only saved if and when I made any changes to the node after clicking on it.
Use case or problem
My use case is language learning. I’m using Obsidian to organize new words I want to learn in a foreign language I’m trying to pick up. For this I record some information about each word (such as inflectional forms) and also link it to related words.
To illustrate, suppose I’ve got the word “to sing” (for which I might write down such forms as “he sang” and “he has sung”), and I created a link to “music”, which has not yet been created. If I click on “music” in the graph, this node is created, and will henceforth not show as non-existent anymore.
Why is this a problem? Because I have not yet recorded anything about the word “music”, and would like to keep the node non-existent until I do.
Why not just refrain from clicking on “music”? Two reasons: a) I might do it accidentally; and b) I might want to do it on purpose if I want to check e.g. what other nodes link to “music” (as far as I can tell this is not possible without opening a node).
Proposed solution
Add a preference setting to avoid creating nodes (i.e. save their files) unless something about the node was changed, the same way that creating a new empty file in a text editor and then closing it without making any changes will generally not save it.
Current workaround (optional)
My current work around is to manually delete each such file after accidental creating, but this is cumbersome.
Thanks, everyone!