Why does ctrl + mouse-click not open wikilinks in a new tab while in source mode?

What I’m trying to do

I’m not sure if this is a bug or not — I’ll assume it is intended behaviour for now.

I’m trying to open a note in a new tab by using “Ctrl + mouse-click” on a wikilink while using source mode, and it just opens the note on my current tab instead.

It works like I’d expect on live-preview mode — hold Ctrl, click on the highlighted wikilink text, that note opens in a new tab on my current tab group. “Ctrl + Alt + mouse-click” behaves normally on both source and live-preview, opening the note in a new tab inside a new tab group.

Does anyone know why this is the standard behaviour that Obsidian chose to go with and why it would be different between source and live-preview? Does Ctrl work as a modifier for something else in source mode or something like that?

And most importantly, does anyone know if I can make the behaviour of Ctrl-clicking a wikilink to be the same in both source and live-preview modes? I switch very often between both modes and having different behaviours really disrupts my workflow.

Things I have tried

I checked the behaviour in a sandbox vault to check if it wasn’t some conflict with my community plugins or something like that — the behaviour described above was observed in the sandbox vault as well as in my personal vault.

I checked the Obsidian Help website for anything extra on source mode view, but it only has a very basic explanation on what each editing mode is and how to change them. I also searched for some variations of the terms “source mode”, “new tab”, and “ctrl” here in the forums, but found nothing of relevance to my question.

1 Like

I don’t use Source Mode, so I never noticed. But I can confirm, even on MacOS Cmd-click is inconsistent and doesn’t open in new tab in Source.

But I can suggest two workarounds:

  1. In Source mode, just a single left click doesn’t do anything. So Ctrl is the modifier for it to even work as a link. That might explain the difference. Ctrl-shift-click does open in a new tab (or at least Cmd-shift-click on Mac does).
  2. You can map Open link under cursor in new tab to a hotkey, if that helps. No mouse required.