Frontmatter Markdown Links

Frontmatter Markdown Links

Obsidian treats a property whose whole value is one link, [[wikilink]] or [text](note.md), as a real link. But put several links in one value, such as "[[Chapter one]] and [Chapter two](<Chapter two.md>)", and Obsidian draws the whole value as one broken link: none of the links in it resolves, opens or counts as a backlink. And while you edit in Source mode, no link in the frontmatter is clickable at all.

This plugin makes every link in frontmatter a real link — each link in a multi-link value on its own, wikilinks and markdown links alike, clickable in Source mode, Live Preview and Reading, resolvable, and counted as a backlink on its target.

Long-requested on the Obsidian forum, for both internal and external links.

Demo vault

The documentation is a demo vault. Every feature has a note that explains what it does and why you would want it — and whose own properties are the demonstration.

Start reading here — it is plain markdown, so it works on GitHub with nothing installed.

A copy of the vault ships with every release. You can access it via any of the following:

1. Running the Frontmatter Markdown Links: Open demo vault command.
2. Downloading frontmatter-markdown-links-demo-vault.zip from the Releases. It unzips into a single frontmatter-markdown-links-demo-vault-<version> folder.
3. Browsing its source in demo-vault/ in this repository.

What it does

• Several links in one property become separate real links, and every frontmatter link is clickable in Source mode too — with paths that contain spaces working either percent-encoded or in angle brackets, and embeds supported too. 01 Frontmatter markdown links
• They count as backlinks, so a note linked only from inside a multi-link property still shows up on its target. 02 Backlinks
• Settings, including how much of this you want. 03 Settings

Renames

Obsidian's own link update can ruin some of your frontmatter links, so up to version 2 this plugin handled renames itself. Since 3.0.0 it does not, and rename and delete handling belongs to Advanced Rename and Delete Handler instead — one plugin owning it for the whole vault, rather than a copy inside each plugin that happened to need it.

This plugin offers to install it, once, and carries your old Should handle renames value over for you to approve. Declining costs you nothing else: every feature above keeps working.

Installation

The plugin is available in the official Community Plugins repository.

Beta versions

To install the latest beta release of this plugin (regardless if it is available in the official Community Plugins repository or not), follow these steps:

1. Ensure you have the BRAT plugin installed and enabled.
2. Click Install via BRAT.
3. An Obsidian pop-up window should appear. In the window, click the Add plugin button once and wait a few seconds for the plugin to install.

Debugging

By default, debug messages for this plugin are hidden.

To show them, run the following command in the DevTools Console:

window.DEBUG.enable('frontmatter-markdown-links');

For more details, refer to the documentation.

Changelog

All notable changes to this project will be documented in the CHANGELOG.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING to get set up.

Support

My other Obsidian resources

See my other Obsidian resources.

License

© Michael Naumov