I love the linking feature you folks have built and I probably use it more than anything else.
My big struggle is that it’s a feature that seems almost hidden:
There doesn’t seem to be a way to surface it with a keyboard and quickly navigate to the linked cards and back
The way it’s surfaced is very… minimal? You can see on this screenshot that the linking data is so hard to parse visually, because it’s tiny and almost seems like a unrelated footnote.
Totally get you. Surfacing backlinks with the keyboard is definitely something we want to add soon, and I’ve raised the priority of this. We have considered adding backlinked (or even related) cards automatically underneath cards in preview mode, so you can quickly navigate and view them at a glance.
If you’re happy with this please change this title to reflect this, such as “Add backlinked cards under card in Preview” to make this more a specific feature request rather than general pain paint / feedback.
Done! I think that would be quite an improvement, I also like the auto-highlight that the current setup has, it would be great to keep that in place with a new implementation of displaying the backlinked cards underneath.
I am assuming due to 2 way linking this would mean navigating to the linked card will allow a somewhat easy navigation back to the original preview card, which should work well.
I would really enjoy this. As it stands now, I have several Parent cards that mostly serve as folders, with not much content on the card iself. It’s more the child cards I am interested in but it’s the Parent’s name that I remember more than the specific child card i need. If Linked cards, AS WELL AS child cards could be displayed below the parent in preview (potentially slightly greyed out to signify it being a child, and dotted around the border to signify a Linked card) that would help so much.
Traversing the graph with keyboard would definitely help my workflow, especially activating outbound inline links (though I can’t really picture an easy way to do so with the current ux where preview mode has no text cursor/caret), backlinks and navigating to a cards parent (seeing as navigating to their children can be done by using the open Noteboard feature with shift + space).
Surfacing bidirectional links seems somewhat analogous to surfacing dependencies between cells in a worksheet. This reminds me of Observable that Mike Bostock is working on, and its minimap feature to surface bidirectional data dependencies between cells in a web-editable notebook (see Minimap | Observable documentation). Traversing between notes based on links between them using a minimap-like structure on the side of the central note preview would be very useful.
Want to bump this! It’s another area of the app where I feel a lot of struggle, being unable to jump between links in a cohesive way
Another area that is less that intuitive is jumping to links that are in the same noteboard view. Right now following any link opens the destination card, whereas if the destination card is on the same board, it would be a much smaller context switch to just move to it and highlight it in some fashion.
You can see in this demo, how going between two linked cards is sort of roundabout
But the biggest issue remains the fact that you can’t traverse links with a keyboard and you can’t see the “front linked” cards (i.e. The link from “Writing files” card to “Reading files”) other that in the body of the card.
I think there is a few improvements that can really help here.
Have there been any planned updates in this area? FWIW, I think I have stumbled into a brilliant solution for this implemented by an Obsidian plugin that could translate very well into Supernotes.
For example popping a modal with a ^ character immediately shows the linked cards. This would be the actual back-linked and front-linked cards as well as parent/child cards. You could also customize this syntax further, if you wanted to target specific relationships, say only “child” cards. This way, while editing/viewing a card the user has immediate keyboard based search window into a specific relation set of cards.
The biggest draw is that not only can you traverse the current card, but you can actually traverse the cards you find in the search modal. So you can look through linked cards, find one and then look through its linked cards, all in a single search modal without any clicks.
I think this would be a huge upgrade to the current approach that I find quite limiting in SN.
Thanks for sharing @fuzzy.beach. To be honest that Obsidian plugin is quite complex and we want to have a lot simpler solutions to problems like these.
In the next update we will be adding lots of improvements to navigation between cards, including things like Breadcrumbs. We’re also experimenting moving the more actions of cards to live within the right hand sidebar. Tapping on any card will automatically show this information, including backlinks.
Tbh I’d like to add a related cards prompt like “recent cards” (Cmd / Ctrl + Shift + R) but we have quite a few sub-prompts already. We’ll keep these improvements to backlinks / accessing related cards in mind, and see what we can do.
P.S. pinging me or Connor directly doesn’t increase the time to response – we read all the new posts everyday, even if we don’t reply.
Fair enough, didn’t mean to be obnoxious with the ping.
I’m cautiously excited to see what the updates entail, because it’s not an easy problem and I am yet to see an easy solution take care of it. For example breadcrumbs don’t solve it because they are a form of linear navigation (and not super keyboard friendly either). Will wait for the updates, is there any timeline for 3.2 ?
We’re hard at work on version 3.2, which will be our next release. While we don’t have an exact release date yet, we’re aiming to maintain our monthly update schedule. The good news is that our current version (3.1.9) is running really smoothly, and we’re thrilled with how it’s performing. As an exciting bonus, we’ve just launched Supernotes VR today - you can check it out here.
?