Insert a List of Backlinks Into All Your Notes
Andy Matuschak shared a script called note-link-janitor with us the other day that maintains a list of backlinks in all of your Markdown notes.
And yes, by “maintains” I really mean “maintains”: if it doesn’t exist, it adds a ## Backlinks section at the end of each Zettel with a list of incoming links, and it updates the section on subsequent runs. This means you can run the script as often as you’d like, and it always produces an up-to-date result – as opposed to, say, naively adding a new ## Backlink section time and time again. When you run the script regularly, you’ll always have an up-to-date backlink list in your notes. Neat.
On the flip side, it deletes any customizations you add to these sections as well, so you better not write in them.
Please test the script on a copy of your notes, because there is no undo, and make backups!
I ran it on a copy of a subset of my notes from the David Epstein videos and on the note 201910011532 Computational thinking, it inserted one link, plus a copy of the phrase it was found in:
## Backlinks
* [[201711181848 Separation of Concerns]]
* [[201910011532 Computational thinking]] is about separation of concerns
The script does find [[wiki links]], but only finds the files when the whole filename is inside the square brackets.
- This link is recognized:
[[201910011532 Computational thinking]] - This is not:
[[201910011532]] Computational thinking
On the upside, there’s hope for a less precise search since the script is open source. (It is written in JavaScript/TypeScript.) Anyone can volunteer to change the file name resolver algorithm to add an option to make it work with partial matches in file names.