Configurable backlinks view - telescope picker and/or vsplit

[sotte]

🚀 The feature, motivation and pitch

It would be great to have more configuration options for the backlink view. I often have many backlinks. The current implementation always opens the backlink view in a quickfix like view at the bottom and only the height is configurable.

It would be great,

a) if the view would be more configurable: use vsplit, tab, ...
b) or if the backlinks could be piped to telescope to that I can easily search and go to the notes with telescope.

(I guess a similar feature would be useful for tags as well: show all files with a given tag in telescope.)

Alternatives

No response

Additional context

No response

[sotte]

For a) one would have to make the botright and split from here configurable.

From the user's perspective it cold look something like this:

backlinks = {
  view_strategy = "vsplit",  -- vsplit|split|tabnew
  ...
}

[epwalsh]

a) if the view would be more configurable: use vsplit, tab, ...

This is easy enough to support. I'd be happy to review a PR with your suggestion.

b) or if the backlinks could be piped to telescope to that I can easily search and go to the notes with telescope.

The Lua API for gathering backlinks is close to being stable. Once it's stable it would be easy enough for users to pipe that into telescope. And that would be a great example to add to the cookbook.

[sotte]

This is easy enough to support. I'd be happy to review a PR with your suggestion.

I'm not sure if I have the time right now to implement this. So, anybody, feel free grab this one 👍

I also might wait for the stable API and then use telescope directly.

[epwalsh]

Sounds good... there's not too much left to do to stabilize the API, I just want to move the functionality into a Client method (it's currently in its own module).

If you don't hear back from me about this within a week or two feel free to ping me.

[epwalsh]

Ok, it's now pretty straightforward to create your own command for this. Here's a snippet:

---@type obsidian.Client
local client = require("obsidian").get_client()

local note = assert(client:resolve_note "OLMo research hub") -- replace with name or ID of your note

client:find_backlinks_async(note, true, function(backlinks)
  local items = {}
  for _, matches in ipairs(backlinks) do
    local path = client:vault_relative_path(matches.path)
    for _, match in ipairs(matches.matches) do
      items[#items + 1] = {
        value = { path = path, line = match.line },
        display = string.format("%s:%s:%s", path, match.line, match.text),
        ordinal = match.text,
        filename = matches.path,
        lnum = match.line,
      }
    end
  end

  local picker = assert(client:picker())
  picker:pick(items, {
    prompt_title = "Backlinks",
    callback = function(value)
      vim.cmd(string.format("e %s", value.path))
      vim.api.nvim_win_set_cursor(0, { tonumber(value.line), 0 })
    end,
  })
end)

I like this a lot, actually, so eventually I'm going to build this in as a configurable "view" for backlinks.

[epwalsh]

Wow, this is actually so much better that I think I just want to make this the default and get rid of the current "location list" view. Of course with telescope you can always open a location list with the search results anyway.

[sotte]

Thank so much @epwalsh. This is great!