I’m running into an issue that may be a bug, or may be baked-in, but regardless it challenges the way I’m using Devonthink.
I build Markdown notes-to-self using links to other notes, but rather than using the note title in the square brackets, I put my own words to support the context. Like this:
Editor:
Preview:
But then if I change anything in the file name of any linked file, all the links on the page revert to their file names. This screenshot shows what happened when I changed the name of the file referencing Bellah:
Editor
Preview
This is vexing, to put it mildly. Building a note-to-self often suggests more relevant names for linked notes, so I want to be able to change those file names without wrecking the flow of the note-to-self. Some of these notes have a couple of dozen linked notes, and I live in dread that thoughtlessly changing one file name will alter all the notes that file might be linked to.
Is this behaviour part of the infrastructure, and non-negotiable? Or is it fixable?
It’s not only not a bug, it’s a feature from user requests You are doing something non-standard here.
Go into Preferences > WikiLinks and disable the option to update item link names automatically.
I can see how that would work for some, but it’s unhelpful for us non-standard types… the sort that don’t check Preferences before posting.
What would work would be the ability to have an alias referencing a Markdown link, maybe defined by a pipe within the link itself. So that: [as Vermeule says|211125-vermeule-radical imagination](x-devonthink-item xxx etc) just presents “as Vermeule says” as a clickable link in Preview mode. Pretty sure I’ve seen this somewhere … then, perhaps, those of us with non-standard usage could still maintain the integrity of our links, and keep them updated, and not have a lot of link guff in our prose.
Why don’t you turn of the preference if you don’t need it?
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I’ve turned it off, of course, but would like my cake and be able to eat it too.
So you want Wikilinks that do not behave like Wikilinks? Just use a quantum computer!
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