Relative markdown link following for better GitHub integration?

[Woodshape]

Hello everybody,

I have the following problem. I want to set up my obsidian.nvim to integrate nicely with GitHub as a frontend.

Assuming this project structure

• root (.obsidian's home)
  • projects
    • some-link.md
    • some-other-link.md

Inside some-link.md I have a forward link to some-other-link.md using the markdown syntax some-other-link (some-other-link.md). This is required to be relative to the path of some-link.md because of how GitHub handles links internally. So (projects/some-other-link.md) will not work with GitHub and leads to GitHub linking .../blob/projects/projects/some-other-link.md to produce a 404.

As far as I understand, using the relative link (some-other-link.md) instead of (projects/some-other-link.md) will not work inside obsidian.nvim and will produce the error Failed to resolve file 'some-other-link.md' when calling :ObsidianFollowLink.

Am I doing something wrong here or is relative path in vault linking not supported by this extension (specifically :ObsidianFollowLink or gf)?

Thanks in advance

[epwalsh]

Hey @Woodshape, this is supported in general so it looks like you may have found a bug. Is your obsidian.nvim up to date with main?

[Woodshape]

Hey @epwalsh, thanks for the quick answer.

I am using the current master branch version 2.5.0.
The problem / bug still persists with the 2.5.1. version.

The same thing happens with :ObsidianBacklinks not working, which makes sense in this case.

Btw. I am using the default config in my lazy.nvim setup.

[epwalsh]

If your notes go in a projects subfolder, do you have notes_subdir set to "projects" in your config?

[epwalsh]

Ah, I did find a bug though that should fix :ObsidianFollowLink for you regardless of what your notes_subdir is set to. 0f7517b

I'm still looking into the backlinks issue.

[epwalsh]

Backlinks issue now fixed as well: 827668e

[Woodshape]

Awesome!
Thanks for the great and quick work.
I really appreciate that and love the work you (and the other contributors) are doing.

[morgaan]

Hi,

First of all thank you for this awesome plugin!
I have the same use case than @Woodshape, and would like my notes to be able to resolve backlinks even outside Obsidian and Neovim. I'm using currently version 3.6.1 and I'm using markdown links rather than wiki one.
I have a vault, with 5 folders (0 Inbox, 1 Projects, 2 Areas...) following the Second Brain PARA method. In the projects folder I have one level of subfolder for each project. I have a main note per project that aim at linking at other notes, both notes that lives beside the main note, or leaving somewhere else in the vault. What I'm aiming for is the ability from the cmp suggestions to have the options of a link with the relative path. At the moment, and this could be a misconfiguration from my end, all the suggestions contains an absolute link (e.g 1 Projects/My exciting new project/exciting-new-project-inspirations.md (I would expect exciting-new-project-inspirations.md at that point). The worth part is that the Obsidian client is not able to link to this note when I click on its link from the main note. Moreover it attempts to create a new note in same folder with name 1. If if manually patch the path to be relative after using the completion, both gf in the plugin and clicking the link in the client work. Moreover, the linkage also work in Gitlab, oh and the backlinks functionality then works as well.

Below is the configuration options I've set if this is of any help.

  opts = {
    workspaces = {
      {
        name = "Second Brain",
        path = "~/second-brain",
      }
    },

	-- Completion of wiki links, local markdown links, and tags using nvim-cmp.
	completion = {
		-- Set to false to disable completion.
		nvim_cmp = true,
		-- Trigger completion at 2 chars.
		min_chars = 2,
	},

	preferred_link_style = "markdown",

	picker = {
		name = "telescope.nvim",
		mappings = {
			-- Create a new note from your query.
			new = "<C-x>",
			-- Insert a link to the selected note.
			insert_link = "<C-l>",
		}
	},

	note_frontmatter_func = function(note)
		-- Add the title of the note as an alias.
		if note.title then
			note:add_alias(note.title)
		end

		local out = { aliases = note.aliases, tags = note.tags }

		-- `note.metadata` contains any manually added fields in the frontmatter.
		-- So here we just make sure those fields are kept in the frontmatter.
		if note.metadata ~= nil and not vim.tbl_isempty(note.metadata) then
			for k, v in pairs(note.metadata) do
				out[k] = v
			end
		end

		return out
	end,

	new_notes_location = "current_dir",

	note_id_func = function(title)
		-- Create note IDs in a Zettelkasten format with a timestamp and a suffix.
		-- In this case a note with the title 'My new note' will be given an ID that looks
		-- like '1657296016-my-new-note', and therefore the file name '1657296016-my-new-note.md'
		local suffix = ""
		if title ~= nil then
			-- If title is given, transform it into valid file name.
			suffix = title:gsub(" ", "-"):gsub("[^A-Za-z0-9-]", ""):lower()
		else
			-- If title is nil, just add 4 random uppercase letters to the suffix.
			for _ = 1, 4 do
				suffix = suffix .. string.char(math.random(65, 90))
			end
		end
		-- return tostring(os.time()) .. "-" .. suffix
		return suffix
	end,

	templates = {
		subdir = "4 Archives/zzz_notes-templates/nvim",
		date_format = "%Y-%m-%d",
		time_format = "%H:%M",
		tags = "",
		substitutions = {
			year = function()
				return os.date("%Y", os.time())
			end
		}
	},

	markdown_link_func = function(opts)
		return require("obsidian.util").markdown_link(opts)
	end,

	follow_url_func = function(url)
		-- Open the URL in the default web browser.
		if (vim.loop.os_uname().sysname == "Linux") then
			vim.fn.jobstart({"xdg-open", url}) -- Linux
		else
			vim.fn.jobstart({"open", url})  -- MacOS
		end
	end,
  }

Am I doing anything wrong?

Thank you in advance

[epwalsh]

Hey @morgaan...

What I'm aiming for is the ability from the cmp suggestions to have the options of a link with the relative path.

Do the cmp suggestions you want, you just need to customize your markdown_link_func. See obsidian.util.markdown_link() for a starting point.

As for the issue with following those links, I just figured out what that issue was and pushed a fix: 3393e3b

[morgaan]

Thank you @epwalsh, unfortunately I'm not a Lua developer and although I looked at the code of obsidian.util.markdown_link() I'm not sure how to construct the path to be relative to the note currently loaded in the buffer.
Searching the source code for relative_path I see some occurences using a client instance that I'm not sure we have at disposal in the scope of that markdown_link_func function (override).
Maybe something more obvious for you 🤷.
Moreover I feel this could be something that you could add to your recipes and that would most certainly benefit the community. Trust me I wish I would be enough equipped to benefit myself here, but I'm not 😢.

Looking forward to your answer, and thank you again for all the hard work.