What are "links"?

I’m struggling a little trying to understand what DT should consider to be a ‘link’ - and therefore, what should be listed in the Document Inspector → Links tab.

According to the manual/help:

[…] For the selected document, DEVONthink will attempt to determine if it contains links. These may be web URLs, file URLs, item links, and even DEVONthink’s WikiLinks.

This made me think that ‘links’ should include wikilinks to database items, links to external URLs, as well as images and transclusions. If I drag-and-drop an image from my database into my markdown document, am I not establishing a ‘connection’ between those 2? If I ‘insert’ a markdown document inside another, is the recipient not ‘linking’ to the included file?

What is also making me confused is that when looking at a markdown document, the Inspector will show me a different list of links depending on whether I’m looking at ‘Editor’ or ‘Preview’ mode. In ‘Editor’ mode, it will include things like email addresses that may be present on the document (but haven’t been explicitly made into links), and not in Preview…

For the Incoming Links section only item links (e.g. copied via Edit > Copy Item Link or inserted via Cmd-Alt-drag & drop) and automatic Wiki links matter currently. Or do you mean the Links pane of this inspector?

Thank you for the quick answer, @cgrunenberg! I am talking about both panes in that Inspector - the ‘Links’ and ‘Incoming Links’. Here is what is making me confused:

  • in ‘Links’ - which displays ‘outgoing links’ - I don’t see some ‘links’ that I’d expect to see (e.g., links to images that are in the markdown document, or to files that were included via transclusion), and I do see some ‘links’ that I didn’t expect (e.g., email addresses that are mentioned somewhere in the file, when the markdown file is being viewed in ‘Editor’ mode).

  • in ‘Incoming Links’ I just don’t see the items I expected:

    • I was hoping to be able to click on an image and see all the places where the image file is being used/included in the markdown text
    • I was also hoping to be able to click on a file and see all the places where the file has been transcluded.

Something else that made me confused was the fact that even though DT seems to be “keeping track” of all (wiki)links in all documents, it doesn’t auto-update the wikilink if I change the linked file’s name - which breaks all wikilinks to it.

For example, let’s say I have a document titled ‘My Doc’. I can then go to a dozen other documents and create [[My Doc]] wikilinks everywhere. But if I go back to ‘My Doc’ and rename it to ‘Your Doc’, all these wikilinks are now broken. I would have expected DT to auto-update these links. Is there a way to do this automatically that I’ve missed?

Examples documents plus screenshots would be useful in this case too, thanks.

I think that is not possible. Like “I copy/pasted something from another document, now I’d like to see from where.”

DT is not a Wiki. And I don’t think it is advertised as such. What you would like to have would require a kind of “from-to link table” in the background, for every MD document. And the same for every image, just the other way around, in a “to-from” table. So you’d need a whole lot of doubly-linked lists so simulate something in DT that a dedicated software might already have.
While a Wiki is set up to have that, DT is not. So if that is what you need frequently, you might be better of with something like Wiki-Wiki.
Alternatively, you could write a script that finds all occurrenes of the currently selected link or image and shows/modifies them. Which is actually a lot less difficult than it sounds.

It would be wonderful if ‘Links’ and ‘Incoming Links’ showed links to images, transclusions, etc.

Isn’t an image link _out_going rather than _in_coming? Or maybe I’m getting in and out wrong.

Transclusions aren’t supported in the Document > Links inspector. However, linked images are shown in the Document > Attachments inspector when when using Preview mode…