Source Linker

Source Linker is an Obsidian community plugin that converts external Markdown links in the active note into internal links to source notes.

When you run Convert external links to source notes, the plugin:

• Finds standard inline Markdown links in the active note.
• Reuses an existing note when its front matter contains source: <url>.
• Creates a new note with source: <url> when no match exists.
• Preserves the original link label by using Obsidian's native link generation.

Scope

Version 1 intentionally stays narrow:

• Processes only the active note.
• Supports standard inline links like [label](https://example.com).
• Skips wiki links, embeds, bare URLs, HTML links, reference-style links, fenced code blocks, and inline code.
• Skips ambiguous matches when multiple notes share the same source URL.

Settings

• New note folder: destination folder for newly created source notes. Leave it empty to use Obsidian's default new note location.
• New note title strategy: choose between link label, hostname plus URL slug, or timestamp fallback.
• Link replacement mode: ask every time, replace all links, or replace only links that already have source notes.
• Duplicate handling: v1 skips ambiguous source matches.

Development

npm install
npm run dev

To build a production bundle:

npm run build

Manual testing

Copy manifest.json, main.js, and styles.css to:

<Vault>/.obsidian/plugins/source-linker/

Then reload Obsidian and enable the plugin in Settings → Community plugins.