Edit Link Alias

Changing what a link says in Obsidian means editing the raw link text by hand — finding the | in a wikilink or the right pair of brackets in a markdown link, in the middle of a sentence, without breaking either. In Reading view you cannot do it at all without switching modes.

This plugin edits the link under your cursor through a small pop-up: Edit link alias changes just the display text, and Edit link (URL and alias) changes the target and the text together. Both work on wikilinks, markdown links, external links and links in a note's properties, from the Command Palette, the right-click menu, or Alt + clicking the link itself.

More screenshots

Demo vault

The documentation is a demo vault. Every feature has a note that explains what it does and why you would want it, with links of every kind already in place to edit.

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 Edit Link Alias: Open demo vault command.
2. Downloading edit-link-alias-demo-vault.zip from the Releases. It unzips into a single edit-link-alias-demo-vault-<version> folder.
3. Browsing its source in demo-vault/ in this repository.

What it does

• Edit a link's display text without hunting for the | or the brackets. 01 Edit link alias
• Edit the target and the text together, in one two-field pop-up. 03 Edit link URL and alias
• Alt + click a link to edit it — in Reading view, Live Preview and source mode, on desktop and mobile. It opens on the alias with the text selected, since that is the more common edit, and Tab moves to the URL. Alt + click is used because Obsidian gives it no meaning on a link, so nothing you already do changes. 04 Alt click a link to edit it
• External links work the same way. 02 External links
• Links in properties are editable too, written back through the frontmatter so the value stays valid YAML — with the two consequences that follow from that. 05 Frontmatter links

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('edit-link-alias');

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