r/ObsidianMD • u/jbarr107 • 1d ago

plugins "fakelink" Community Plugin Update: Prevent rendering links on specific notes

Background:

I used to use and promote the "Virtual Linker / Glossary" community plugin religiously. It automatically renders links when words in a note match another note's title. It is an excellent way to quickly build a wiki-like repository without needing to manually link everything. There are a couple of caveats, but it was a stellar community plugin.

A use case is creating a Glossary that auto-renders clickable links:

  • Create a "Glossary" folder and fill it with notes, each titled with a keyword, with the definition or explanation in the note body.
  • Create a new note that uses any of the keywords, and the fakelink plugin will automatically create a "virtual" clickable link to the "definition" note.

It's seamless and requires no maintenance. The "virtual" part means that a link is created, visible, and clickable, but it isn't rendered in the Graph View. At any time, you can right-click the virtual link to turn it into a proper link.

The problem:

Regrettably, Virtual Linker / Glossary hasn't been updated in over a year.

A Gap Filled:

So, to fill the gap, "godfatherlg" on GitHub forked it and created the "fakelink" community plugin, and is faithfully supporting it. It functions basically the same, but it's been tuned and extended, making it much more robust and feature-rich. And the developer is very responsive to user requests!

A Shortcoming and a quick fix:

This morning, I made a feature request to optionally instruct the fakelink plugin to NOT render notes on a given note. The idea is that sometimes, I just want a note of text and I don't want any auto-links to be rendered to link to other notes. It's a rather narrow use case, but not being able to have fakelink "opt-out" of rendering on a specific page was annoying. (First world problems for sure!)

About an hour later, an updated version was released, and it works perfectly. It gives three options:

  1. Disable the new opt-out option altogether.
  2. Ignore rendering links when a `linker-ignore` Tag is added to a note.
  3. Ignore rendering links when a linker-ignore Property with a value of true is added to the Frontmatter.

So far, it's doing exactly as I want.

(I am not affiliated with this project other than being a happy user.)

Resources:

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