Linkosaurus turns plain text into wikilinks as you type. Write a keyword, press Space — and the link is already there. No reaching for [[, no autocomplete popup to fight, no breaking your train of thought. You just write, and your notes quietly weave themselves together.

I built Linkosaurus because I wanted linking to disappear as a task. In a good vault the connections between notes are the whole point — but stopping to type brackets, wait for a suggestion list, and pick the right entry pulls me out of writing every single time. So I made a plugin that does it in the background: it watches for the note names, aliases, and keywords you already care about, and links them the moment you finish a word. It works on desktop and mobile, and it runs entirely offline.

Linkosaurus keeps growing, but it's meant to stay small and quiet — a plugin you forget is running until you notice your notes are all connected. If something feels off or you have an idea, open an issue on GitHub; I read everything.

What it looks like

You type	Linkosaurus writes
Tokyo	[[Tokyo]]
ML	[[Machine Learning|ML]]
Berlin.	[[Berlin]].
(Paris)	([[Paris]])
T-Rex - Facebook	[[T-Rex]] - [[Facebook]]
trip//Tokyo	[[Tokyo|trip]]
///cherry blossoms///Tokyo	[[Tokyo|cherry blossoms]]
youtube.com	[youtube.com](https://youtube.com)
https://www.example.com/blog	[example.com/blog](https://www.example.com/blog)

And while you're writing an inline alias, an autocomplete popup floats in beside the cursor and suggests the target as you type — Enter or Tab drops the finished link. On by default, one switch turns it off.

Need a note the auto-linker can't reach — say T-Rex - Feeding Schedule, where T-Rex links before the full name has a chance? Type ;; and the same popup becomes a search across everything linkable in your vault. Pick the note, and [[T-Rex - Feeding Schedule]] lands whole.

Features

Auto-link while you type

This is the heart of the plugin. Linkosaurus watches the word (or words) you just finished and, the instant you press Space, Enter, or common punctuation — ) . , ! ? : ; — it replaces a match with the right wikilink. You never stop writing.

Names and separators stay intact

If you keep sub-notes like T-Rex - Instagram and T-Rex - Facebook alongside a main T-Rex note (your T-Rex has social media, no judgement), Linkosaurus links each piece on its own: typing T-Rex - Facebook gives you [[T-Rex]] - [[Facebook]]. The dinosaur keeps its link, the platform gets its own, and the separator is left alone.

Multi-word keywords with smart undo

When one keyword is the beginning of a longer one, Linkosaurus waits a beat to see where you're going.

With both Open and Open Source in your list:

1. Open → [[Open]]
2. You type S → Linkosaurus realises Open S… might become Open Source, quietly undoes the link → Open S
3. You type ource → [[Open Source]]

If your next character can't continue the longer term (Open H…), the original [[Open]] link simply stays. You always end up with the most specific link, and you never have to think about it.

Inline aliases

Sometimes the word on the page isn't the note's name. Add display text without breaking flow:

Single-word (default delimiter //):

trip//Tokyo  →  [[Tokyo|trip]]

Multi-word (default delimiter ///):

///cherry blossoms///Tokyo  →  [[Tokyo|cherry blossoms]]

The target on the right must exist in your keyword list, and both delimiters are configurable.

Alias autocomplete

You don't have to remember the target's exact name. The moment you start typing the target part of an alias, a small panel floats in beside the cursor with matching suggestions — fuzzy-matched from your note names, keywords, and frontmatter aliases:

trip//T▌
┌──────────────────┐
│ 🔗 Tokyo         │
│ 🔗 T-Rex         │
└──────────────────┘

Arrow keys to choose, Enter or Tab to link — [[Tokyo|trip]] lands fully formed, no trailing space needed. (Choose wisely; a trip to the T-Rex is a very different itinerary.) Keep typing to narrow the list (Tky still finds Tokyo), or press Esc and finish the alias by hand; the classic flow is untouched, and the popup never picks for you.

The whole thing is on by default and lives behind a single switch — Settings → Alias target suggestions — if you'd rather write without it. Both accept keys have their own toggle on top: turn Enter off to keep it for line breaks and link with Tab alone, or the other way around.

Quick link search

Auto-linking fires the moment a word ends — which means a note like T-Rex - Feeding Schedule is unreachable by typing alone: T-Rex links first, and the rest of the name never gets its turn. For those, summon the search. Type ;; and the popup appears again, now listing everything linkable in your vault — note names, keywords, frontmatter aliases — and filtering as you type. Spaces are fine:

;;T-Rex - F▌
┌──────────────────────────────┐
│ 🔗 T-Rex - Feeding Schedule  │
└──────────────────────────────┘

Enter, Tab, or a click replaces the whole search — trigger and all — with [[T-Rex - Feeding Schedule]]. Too lazy to type the full name? ;;feed gets you there too — it's fuzzy. Mappings behave exactly like the auto-linker: picking ML inserts [[Machine Learning|ML]].

The search only starts when you mean it: the trigger does nothing mid-word, doubled up, or followed by a space — so if you change it to * (it's configurable in the settings), your bullet lists and bold text stay popup-free. It shares the Enter/Tab accept toggles with the alias autocomplete, and its own switch — Settings → Note search popup — turns it off entirely.

It learns your vault automatically

With vault scanning on (the default), every note name becomes a keyword the moment the note exists — create Project Aurora.md and it's instantly auto-linkable everywhere. Linkosaurus also picks up wikilinks pointing at notes you haven't written yet, so you can link forward and let the notes catch up later.

Frontmatter aliases

Linkosaurus reads the aliases: field from your YAML frontmatter. If Tokyo.md lists Edo as an alias, typing Edo links straight to [[Tokyo|Edo]]. Toggleable.

Case-insensitive matching

tokyo, Tokyo, and TOKYO all resolve to the same note. Toggleable.

Paste and dictation

Text you paste or dictate is scanned in a single pass — keywords and URLs alike are converted as it lands, so pasted paragraphs come in pre-linked.

Auto-link URLs

Plain web addresses become tidy Markdown links on their own:

You type	Linkosaurus writes
https://www.github.com	[github.com](https://www.github.com)
github.com	[github.com](https://github.com)
http://example.com/blog	[example.com/blog](http://example.com/blog)
https://shop.example.com/p?id=1	[shop.example.com/p](https://shop.example.com/p?id=1)

The display text strips the protocol, www., query string, fragment, and trailing slash; the link target keeps the full URL. Bare domains are only linked when their top-level domain is in your allowlist (defaults: de com org net io shop app dev — editable). Toggleable.

Periodic auto-relink

New keywords don't reach back in time on their own — a note created today won't have its name linked in a note you wrote last week. Turn on periodic auto-relink and Linkosaurus re-scans the vault on a schedule (1–60 minutes), converting matches it finds in plain text. It also fires automatically (debounced) when you create or rename a note. Notes you have open are skipped so your cursor never jumps, and every existing rule is respected — blocklist, code blocks, frontmatter, URLs, and self-links.

Off by default; turn it on if you like your whole vault kept in sync.

Bulk commands

Command	What it does
Auto-link keywords in current note	Links every matching keyword in the note you're in, in one pass
Auto-link keywords in all notes	A one-shot sweep across the whole vault (open notes are skipped)
Link selection and add to keyword list	Links the selected word and remembers it as a keyword — assign a hotkey for the fastest possible workflow

Where Linkosaurus stays out of the way

It deliberately does nothing:

• Inside existing [[wikilinks]]
• Inside [markdown](links)
• Inside fenced or inline code blocks
• Inside URLs (unless URL auto-linking is on)
• Inside YAML frontmatter

Keyword list syntax

You keep your own keywords in the plugin settings, one entry per line:

# Comments start with #
London
Tokyo

# Alias mapping: keyword = target note
ML = Machine Learning

• London — keyword and target are the same → [[London]]
• ML = Machine Learning — ML is what you type, Machine Learning is the note it links to → [[Machine Learning|ML]]
• Lines starting with # are comments; empty lines are ignored
• Manual entries always take priority over auto-detected vault keywords

Settings

Linkosaurus ships with more knobs than most people will ever need — I tried to write a plain-language explanation for each one, so browse the settings tab and the option you're looking for is probably already there.

Setting	Description
Keyword list	Your manually defined keywords
Case-insensitive matching	Ignore case when matching
Single-word alias delimiter	Inline alias delimiter for single-word display text (default //)
Multi-word alias delimiter	Inline alias delimiter for multi-word display text (default ///)
Alias target suggestions	Autocomplete popup for the target part of an alias (on by default)
Note search popup	The ;; quick search across everything linkable (on by default)
Search trigger	Characters that open the note search (default ;;)
Accept suggestion with Enter	Enter links the highlighted suggestion (on by default)
Accept suggestion with Tab	Tab links the highlighted suggestion (on by default)
Auto-detect vault links	Use every note name in the vault as a keyword
Include frontmatter aliases	Use aliases: fields from frontmatter as keywords
Minimum keyword length	Floor for auto-detected keyword length (0 = no limit)
Blocklist	Keywords excluded from auto-linking (e.g. Home, Inbox, Daily)
Folder filter mode	Include or exclude folders
Folder filter	Folders to filter from vault scanning
Enable periodic auto-relink	Periodic vault scan that retroactively links keywords (off by default)
Relink interval (minutes)	How often to scan (1–60 minutes, default 5)
Auto-link website URLs	Convert http(s)://… and bare domains to Markdown links (on by default)
URL top-level domains	TLDs recognised for bare domains (one per line)

Privacy

I treat privacy as the default, not a feature. Linkosaurus runs entirely on your device — no notes, keywords, or URLs ever leave your vault, and the plugin makes no network requests of any kind. The only thing hosted anywhere is the open-source code, right here on GitHub.

Installation

From Community Plugins

1. Open Settings → Community plugins → Browse
2. Search for Linkosaurus
3. Click Install, then Enable

Manual

1. Download main.js and manifest.json from the latest release
2. Drop them into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/autolink-keywords/
3. Enable Linkosaurus under Settings → Community plugins

Feedback, questions, ideas

Linkosaurus is a small, one-person project, built and maintained alongside everything else in life. If you hit a bug, want a feature, or just want to tell me how you use it, please head over to GitHub — it genuinely helps, and it's what keeps the plugin moving.

Happy linking. 🦕