पेज · Mark It Down

Wiki-links + Backlinks

Mark It Down treats [[note title]] inside any markdown body as a navigable internal reference. The Notes sidebar gains a companion Backlinks view that lists every note linking to whatever you currently have open.

Syntax

Form	Meaning
`[[Schema Design]]`	Link to a note titled "Schema Design"
`[[Schema Design#fk]]`	Link to a note + heading anchor
`[[Schema Design\|see schema]]`	Link with a display alias

Matching is case-insensitive and collapses inner whitespace, so [[schema design]] resolves the same as [[Schema Design]].

Rendering

The webview pre-processes the markdown source before marked runs. Each wiki-link becomes a small inline anchor:

Resolved — solid underline, accent colour. Click jumps to the note.
Ambiguous — warning colour. Multiple notes share the title; clicking opens a Quick Pick.
Broken — red dotted underline. Clicking offers to create a new note using the bracketed text as the title.

Wiki-links inside fenced code blocks, indented code, or inline backticks are left as plain text — same as how Obsidian and many other tools handle them.

Backlinks panel

Open any note via the Notes sidebar; the Backlinks view (just below Notes in the activity bar container) refreshes to show every other note whose body contains a wiki-link to the active note. Each row shows the linking note's title plus the verbatim wiki-link as it appeared in the source — handy when scanning for outdated aliases.

The backlinks index lives in process and rebuilds:

immediately on note create / rename / delete (via NotesStore.onDidChange),
with a 300 ms debounce after a save that mutates a body,
on demand via the Refresh Backlinks action in the panel header.

For a few thousand notes this is well under a frame; once the corpus passes the ~10k mark, swap BacklinksIndex.rebuild() for an incremental per-note hash cache.

Self-links

Self-links (a note linking to itself) parse normally but are deliberately omitted from the backlinks map — otherwise every note with a TOC heading would show itself as a backlink and add nothing.

Implementation map

File	Role
`packages/core/src/wikilinks/parser.ts`	Pure parser, masks code regions to keep offsets stable
`packages/core/src/wikilinks/resolver.ts`	Resolution + corpus-wide backlink builder
`packages/core/src/wikilinks/renderer.ts`	Source rewrite into anchor HTML
`packages/core/src/markdown/renderer.ts`	Wires the rewrite into the existing marked → DOMPurify pipeline (opt-in via `notes` option)
`src/notes/backlinksIndex.ts`	Refreshable in-memory map keyed by note id
`src/notes/backlinksProvider.ts`	TreeDataProvider + `NoteIndexProvider` adapter for the editor
`src/editor/markdownEditorProvider.ts`	Ships the note title list to the webview, handles `openWikilink` clicks
`src/webview/main.ts`	Binds click handlers to `.mid-wikilink` elements
`src/editor/webviewBuilder.ts`	Wiki-link styles

Testing

$ pnpm dlx vitest run tests/unit/wikilinks

17 unit tests cover the parser (code-fence skipping, alias/anchor parsing, multiple links per line) and the resolver (case-folding, ambiguity, self-link suppression, alias preservation in backlinks).

Future work

Render [[wiki-links]] in the published static site by reusing the same rewriteWikiLinks helper inside publishManager.ts (currently the published HTML strips them as plain bracketed text).
MCP tool get_backlinks(id) so external agents can traverse the graph without reading every note body themselves.