[Implemented] Rem Reference Aliases

[whuynh]

Hello! Firstly, yay new forum!

As a former org-roam user, a fantastic feature for keeping documents organized is the ability to assign multiple aliases that a document can be referenced from. In other words, you can reference one document with multiple different words/phrases.

To elaborate, here’s an example how org-roam handles aliases

1. Say I create a “Hypertension” document
2. I can create the property “roam_alias” for the document and include “HTN”, “high blood pressure”, etc.
3. Now every time I insert a reference to “Hypertension”, “HTN,” or “high blood pressure” it would open to the same Hypertension document

I imagine this would be a bit complicated to implement considering org-roam references are specifically to documents, whereas remnote references can be to rem documents or rem-within-rem, but it would be epic if at some point this could be done.

The best alternative I can currently think of with Remnote’s current capabilities is to create a document (“Hypertension”), create additional documents (“HTN”, “high blood pressure”) and keep the additional documents completely blank except for a reference to the first document

[matleonii]

That sounds good!

Something that I think can also help a lot is the ability to create a link to rem with a name that is different from the Rem I’m linking to. I grabbed this from obsidian, not sure if you can do that on roam as well.

For exemple: I want to link to a Rem called: Hypertension; but i want my link to look like: HTN;

In obsidian you do it like this: [[Hypertension | HTN]]

I think this also helps things to get more organized with link and how they fit in the middle of sentences.

[hannesfrank]

For reference the corresponding Github issue: https://github.com/remnoteio/remnote-issues/issues/47 (Closed and alias support is on the roadmap).

[Carlpaul153]

I would like this request to also consider hyperlinks to web pages. Remnote doesn’t have support for them yet.

[hannesfrank]

You can paste URLs (https://…) and they are linked automatically. If you are online the website title is fetched as link text and it can be edited as well.

[liberated_potato]

What @hannesfrank explained above in action + one more hyperlink trick. More explanation here

[peterh]

I’d like to add some emphasis on the importance of this feature, even though I know it’s already on the roadmap.

In the English language, it’s simple to pluralize a noun: most of the time you just add “s” or “es” to your Rem Reference, e.g. “hats” for “hat”. In other languages it is often more difficult. For example, in German you often have to change a vowel to an Umlaut, like “Hut” → “Hüte”, so you can’t just use the Rem Reference in a sentence without making it awkward to read.

Also, synonyms are important for memorization: in speaking different languages, I often find myself having better access to some concepts in English, others are more present in my mother tongue German. This is why I take notes in both languages, but if there is always a single label, Rem References are almost impossible to use when writing multilingual - you just have to stick with one language.

I found that TheBrain has a great implementation of aliases. You can just link any word in a note to a “thought”, which is just referenced by an id, so there are no naming conflicts and the thought always keeps all backlink references. They did this with Markdown-style syntax for links, but you don’t see this syntax in the editor, just in the plain text document files.

[Xujie_Zheng]

I thought the issue is for reference, not just URL, currenlty when you add rem reference, it will show the path to the rem. This is very annoying, it make the entire block of document unreadable. It will be great if it show the text as is when creating the rem reference, or provide some way to edit the text.

If this is somethign already implemented and i missed, please let me know. Love to learn

[Karthikk]

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