Frontmatter Markdown Links

Obsidian makes [[wikilinks]] in frontmatter clickable, but a markdown link written in a property is just text: it does not resolve, it does not open, and it does not register as a backlink. So a vault that uses markdown links everywhere else has to switch styles the moment a link moves into a property.

This plugin makes markdown links in frontmatter real links — clickable in Source mode, Live Preview and Reading, resolvable, and counted as backlinks on their targets.

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

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 — 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

• Markdown links in properties become real links — clickable in every mode, with paths that contain spaces working either percent-encoded or in angle brackets, and embeds supported too. Several links can live in one property. 01 Frontmatter markdown links
• They count as backlinks, so a note linked only from a 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