Inline Link Suggestions

An Obsidian plugin that spots plain-text mentions of your existing notes while you write and underlines them with a subtle dotted line. Click a mention to turn it into a [[wiki link]] — no sidebar, no dialogs, no leaving the flow of writing.

Why

Obsidian's built-in unlinked mentions live in the backlinks sidebar: per-note, exact-title-only, and you have to go looking for them. This plugin brings unlinked mentions into the editor itself:

• Titles and aliases of all your notes are matched as you type.
• Mentions get a quiet dotted underline — no visual noise, theme-friendly.
• Hover an underline to see the suggested note above the text; click it to link: [[Note Title]] when the text matches the title, [[Note Title|original text]] when it matched an alias. Link style follows your "Use [[Wikilinks]]" preference. On mobile, tap the underline instead.
• Works in reading view too (opt-in setting) — linking edits the underlying note.
• A Toggle suggestions command lets you bind a hotkey to switch the whole feature on and off.
• Ignore any term from the ✕ button in the same popup if a suggestion is noise.
• Clicking the underlined text itself just places the cursor — editing is never hijacked.

Features

• Fast: an Aho-Corasick automaton scans only the visible part of the editor, so it stays instant even in vaults with 10,000+ notes. Measured (node scripts/profile.ts): index build ~27 ms for 10k notes (~140 ms for 50k), and ~0.25 ms per viewport scan.
• Smart about context: text inside existing links, tags, code, frontmatter, math, and HTML is never underlined, and neither is the word your cursor is on.
• No self-links: a note never suggests linking to itself.
• Configurable: case sensitivity, minimum term length, alias matching, excluded folders, and a persisted ignore list.
• Local and private: no network requests, no telemetry, no runtime dependencies.
• Works on mobile.

Settings

Setting	Default	Description
Enable suggestions	on	Master toggle (also a command for hotkeys).
Underline in reading view	off	Suggest and link in reading view too.
Case-sensitive matching	off	Require exact case to match.
Include aliases	on	Match frontmatter aliases too.
Minimum term length	3	Skip very short titles/aliases.
Excluded folders	—	Notes here are never suggested (e.g. Templates/).
Disabled folders	—	No underlines while editing notes here (e.g. Journal/).
Ignored terms	—	Never underline these; add from the mention popup.

Folder and term lists are edited as removable chips — type in the field and press Enter to add.

Installation

Not yet in the community plugin directory. Manual install:

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Copy them into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/inline-link-suggestions/.
3. Reload Obsidian and enable the plugin in Settings → Community plugins.

Development

npm install
npm run dev              # watch build
npm test                 # unit tests for the matcher core
npm run test:e2e         # end-to-end tests in a real Obsidian instance
npm run test:e2e:mobile  # same suite, under Obsidian's mobile emulation
npm run build             # type-check + production build

The matching core (src/core/) is pure TypeScript with no Obsidian imports and is fully unit-tested. Editor integration lives in src/editor/ (CodeMirror 6 view plugin).

Mobile testing

End-to-end tests (e2e/specs) run via wdio-obsidian-service against a real, freshly-downloaded Obsidian instance — no mocking. The same specs run twice: once as normal desktop Obsidian (e2e/wdio.conf.mts), once with app.emulateMobile() on (e2e/wdio.mobile-emulation.conf.mts), so the mobile-only tap-to-link path (the Platform.isMobile branch in src/editor/highlighter.ts) is covered without needing a phone or emulator. Both run in CI on every push.

This doesn't cover the real mobile app's Capacitor runtime — only public CM6/Obsidian APIs are used here, so the risk is low, but if that ever matters, wdio-obsidian-service also supports testing the real Obsidian Android app via Appium; see its README.

Roadmap

• Phase 2 — semantic suggestions (opt-in): underline phrases that are semantically close to an existing note even without a literal title match, using local embeddings (Ollama or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint). Local-first, cached on disk, off by default. The SuggestionProvider interface in src/core/types.ts is the seam where this plugs in.

License

MIT