Logseq-like Alias Field behavior, am I missing something?

#1

Hello All, Logseq had a feature called “Aliases” which was a special field you could give to blocks; and would serve as an ‘secondary title’ to that block. For instance

(tiddlername) Foo
(fields) alias:Bar

in Logseq, [[Foo]] and [[Bar]] would render as links with their original display text, but would navigate to the Foo block when clicked. Also any backlinks for [[Foo]] and [[Bar]] are aggregated under the Foo block.

I checked out Uni-links which has something called ‘aliases’ and also the built-in Caption field, but unless I am missing something these don’t behave like this, exactly.

I suppose I could have Bar’s contents be a transclusion of {{Foo}} but that wouldn’t give me the backlink aggregation would it?

Anyway, just let me know if there is a way to do this and if I am misunderstanding something, thanks!

-Xyvir

#2

I think uni-link is the state of the art here. It does much more than this, but this sort of linking is one of its key behaviors. But it does require a slightly different link syntax.

Because of TW’s strong insistence on backward compatibility, I’m pretty sure it would be nearly impossible to change the core link syntax to also support aliases.

#3

I had tried uni-link but couldn’t get this working

I had something like

Foo
aliases:Bar

Then links via [[Bar|?]] Should lead to foo right? But I couldn’t get it working.

#4

Two guesses:

  • Did you save and refresh your wiki before testing? uni-link includes some new and altered JS features, which are only initialized when the wiki is first loaded.
  • Did your test alias contain one or more spaces? The aliases field expects a title list, so [[multi-word aliases]] require square brackets.

Your Foo/Bar test does work on the uni-link demo site:

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I also wanted to suggest @mklauber’s Aliases plugin as an alternative to uni-link in case you hadn’t come across it before. Of the two, uni-link is generally my personal preference as it adds some features Aliases doesn’t have… but Matt’s plugin does use the more Logseq-like syntax you’re looking for, though it doesn’t include the alias backlink aggregation.

1 Like
#5

With the uni-link — extended link functions plugin it should work with both: [[Bar|?]] and [[bar|?]] . Aliases are not case sensitive.

The demo page also contains a button, to create several test tiddlers, so you can play with it.