Freelinks hijacks external links

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HC Haase

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Apr 20, 2020, 5:36:33 AM4/20/20
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I am late to the party, but wow, freelinks is great!!


though, it seems that freelinks overrules the link if it is external and links to the tiddler with the same name as the pretty link.


is this a bug, or is there a setting to deal with this?

Peter Buyze

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Apr 20, 2020, 5:44:06 AM4/20/20
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PMario also mentioned a serious flaw: if your have a tiddler entitled say "boat", then Freelinks will link every instance of the word "boat" in your file to that one tiddler. And PMario is right.

I had enthusiastically installed the Freelink plug-in too, but I immediately encountered this phenomenon and therefore disabled Freelinks.



20 Apr 2020, 12:36 by haas...@gmail.com:
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HC Haase

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Apr 20, 2020, 5:53:18 AM4/20/20
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mandag den 20. april 2020 kl. 11.44.06 UTC+2 skrev Peter Buyze:
PMario also mentioned a serious flaw: if your have a tiddler entitled say "boat", then Freelinks will link every instance of the word "boat" in your file to that one tiddler. And PMario is right.


Yes that can also make problems.

maybe a solution could be a escape character (like ~) to actively ignore linking, paired with a edit-panel button to input the escape character in front of selected text??

Jeremy Ruston

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Apr 20, 2020, 6:27:41 AM4/20/20
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Hi HC

Thanks this is a bug, fixed here for v5.1.23:


The fix will be available at https://tiddlywiki.com/prerelease in a few minutes.

Best wishes

Jeremy.

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PMario

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Apr 20, 2020, 7:05:55 AM4/20/20
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Hi,
But what's the advantage of adding a lot of escape characters into a text that dosn't contain links, if the plugin isn't installed. If you copy/paste such wikitext into a TW that doesn't use the plugin you'll create a lot of unused escape chars, which are visible and annoying.

I do think freelinks makes sense for TW with 10 tiddlers, where the whole prose text belongs together. As I pointed out freelinks will link every tiddler title it can find, even if the actual tiddler text doesn't have a connection to that "word".

Instead of escape chars, use the [[wikitext link]] which is explicit. ... IMO no new escape "confusion" needed.

-mario


Mark S.

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Apr 20, 2020, 10:53:46 AM4/20/20
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Maybe the answer is, if you use freelinks, don't use short, dictionary terms as titles.

Peter Buyze

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Apr 20, 2020, 11:51:08 AM4/20/20
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No, I don't agree, Mark. What you propose is an unnatural workaround. Or, to put it differently, you're proposing the user use the tool in a way to suit the tool.



20 Apr 2020, 17:53 by tiddl...@googlegroups.com:
Maybe the answer is, if you use freelinks, don't use short, dictionary terms as titles.
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Mat

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Apr 20, 2020, 6:24:45 PM4/20/20
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I don't understand the complaint: The purpose with the tool is to link title mentions -- so how can anyone complain about that it does exactly that? And if this purpose aligns with your needs then, yeah, occasionally you might still not want the automatic linking, just like you occasionally don't want automatic CamelCase linking, so it makes sense to be able to disable it locally and the obvious approach would be to prefix it with ~

<:-)
Message has been deleted

Mark S.

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Apr 20, 2020, 6:55:21 PM4/20/20
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This is actually the same as the existing situation with camelcase. If you have an external link that is in camel-case,
the generated link will go to the CamelCase tiddler rather than to the specified external link. I'm pretty sure it's been
like this forever.

In the "readme" for freelinks there are instructions for how to restrain freelinks interpretation per a filter
you specify. So you could turn off freelinks on a tiddler to allow the normal external behavior to apply.

TonyM

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Apr 20, 2020, 8:53:57 PM4/20/20
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Folks,

I consider free links to identify links you did not realise. However this is important with Authorship and research. I think before publishing to others linkifying those incidental links is desirable and turning off free links makes more sense unless the nature of your content supports it. During the linkify process you could also make use of the aliased in the uni-link plugin do formalise relationships in your document.

I doubt it would be easy but being able to click on a free link and linkify it `[[Free link title link]]` so it remains a link after turning off freelinks would be nice.

Regards
Tony

HC Haase

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Apr 21, 2020, 4:12:59 AM4/21/20
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tirsdag den 21. april 2020 kl. 02.53.57 UTC+2 skrev TonyM:
Folks,

I consider free links to identify links you did not realise.

I agree this is exactly why freelinks is great!


I doubt it would be easy but being able to click on a free link and linkify it `[[Free link title link]]` so it remains a link after turning off freelinks would be nice.

I was thinking the same. This would be the very best of both solutions!! I want the link sugestions, but the choise of what to include

freelinks reminds me of daniellos autotag plugin. The idea was good. You wuld get tags of tiddler titiles mentiond in the text, alas there was no way to delete fals positives, so it was not very usefull.

TonyM

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Apr 21, 2020, 8:45:20 AM4/21/20
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HC

There is also a search that highlights the search string where ever it is displayed. Imagin if from this you could also create tiddlers and links.

Regards
Tony

HC Haase

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Apr 22, 2020, 3:22:32 AM4/22/20
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tirsdag den 21. april 2020 kl. 14.45.20 UTC+2 skrev TonyM:
HC

There is also a search that highlights the search string where ever it is displayed.

 
are you referring to bimlas' highlight plugin or something else??
 

Imagen if from this you could also create tiddlers and links.


are you proposing to combine the freelink with search (and how) or is this a separate fantasy? I dont quite follow.

Regards
Tony


springer

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Apr 22, 2020, 1:45:34 PM4/22/20
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Mat and all,

At first I also didn't understand HC's complaint about unwanted "boat" links: freelinks is there to populate the wiki with virtual links; I do want precisely for every "boat" reference to link to the tiddler titled "boat"...

But... I realized even I could need exceptions: For example, the word "will" has a technical definition in Kantian ethics (as in volition, free will, etc.). Suppose I want a tiddler for this concept ("will" as a noun), and my wiki is full of technical passages that would benefit from having this link appear "for free"... Could I take advantage of freelinks while keeping this title? That would be crazy *unless* I could manually prevent sentences about "what ~will happen later" or from pointing people to this tiddler defining "will" as a noun. 

(Maybe this example isn't great because the exceptions might outnumber the positive cases, but you get the idea...)

-Springer

Mark S.

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Apr 22, 2020, 2:20:59 PM4/22/20
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It seems to me that freelinks is doing what it's it supposed to do. If it doesn't work in some
situation, then move on to some other tool.

In the case of "boat" or "will", you could put the title in upper case, to distinguish it as a special word.

"Whatever sinks your BOAT."

"The WILL of man can not be thwarted by mere mendacity..."

In the case of "will", it does indeed seem that the number of false-positives will be higher than the intended use.
Also, you're going to need the plural, possessive, and capitalized versions:

"The many wills overwhelm the few."
"Will is an essential concept in ..."
"It is the will's way to underestimate the capabilities of others."

So you might want a completely different tool, like PMario's uni-link plugin.

springer

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Apr 22, 2020, 2:57:15 PM4/22/20
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Hi Mark, 

Of course workarounds are what all of us find ways to do... but the use-case of pasting in existing text (that I did not write), and having all the linkables just "light up" is more important to my purposes than the risk of false positives. So rather than make strange-looking titles and rework pasted text to point to those titles, an escape character would be a somewhat better solution, for this kind of use. (In the meantime, if I do want to define "will" on a freelinks wiki, I'll tolerate the spurious links.)

As for the aliases issue, I just posted on that too. uni-link is great for some use-cases, but not for pasting in existing text. I'm already eager to have freelinks pick up on aliases. But that's a somewhat different issue from the false-positives issue here.

Best regards,   
-Springer

Jeremy Ruston

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Apr 22, 2020, 4:11:34 PM4/22/20
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Hi Elise, Mark,

There are a few different ways we might support selectively excluding tiddlers from freelinking:

* Introduce an escape character that can be inserted before an instance of a title to prevent it from being autolinked. The trouble might come were the target tiddler to subsequently be deleted; should the escape character in any residual links be automatically suppressed? If so, we’d need to carefully choose a character (or character sequence) that we can safely hide
* Exclude links to tiddlers having the field “autolink” set to “no”. The trouble here is that each time we do the autolinking we’d have to check the autolink field of every tiddler
* Maintain in a configuration tiddler a list of titles (or regexps) of tiddlers that should be excluded from autolinking. This would be far the easiest option to implement. One could still have an edit template segment that (say) displayed a checkbox for whether that particular tiddler should be autolinked

Would any or all of these options meet your needs ?

Best wishes

Jeremy

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Mat

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Apr 22, 2020, 4:47:50 PM4/22/20
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Jeremy Ruston wrote:
* Introduce an escape character that

Of the three alternatives, only this gives individual control over each instance i.e if "boat should link here but not there". The other two would be "binary global".

[...]The trouble might come were the target tiddler to subsequently be deleted; should the escape character in any residual links be automatically suppressed? If so, we’d need to carefully choose a character (or character sequence) that we can safely hide

This sounds similar to the rename plugin (or is it called relink plugin?) where changing a tiddler title modifies it everywhere. 

<:-)

Mark S.

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Apr 22, 2020, 5:07:02 PM4/22/20
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On Wednesday, April 22, 2020 at 1:47:50 PM UTC-7, Mat wrote:
Jeremy Ruston wrote:
* Introduce an escape character that

Of the three alternatives, only this gives individual control over each instance i.e if "boat should link here but not there". The other two would be "binary global".


That's what I was thinking. On the other hand, if someone was following The TiddlyWiki Philosophy, their tiddler would never be too large to fix by hand, so solution #3 could work.

I don't think solution #2 addresses the immediate concerns.
 
[...]The trouble might come were the target tiddler to subsequently be deleted; should the escape character in any residual links be automatically suppressed? If so, we’d need to carefully choose a character (or character sequence) that we can safely hide

This sounds similar to the rename plugin (or is it called relink plugin?) where changing a tiddler title modifies it everywhere. 


I'm assuming that if the special character or characters, say "&@", were present, they would not display at all when the corresponding tiddler did not exist. So the rendered text would look like "boat" for both "boat" and "&@boat" when there was no "boat" tiddler.


Mat

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Apr 22, 2020, 5:18:17 PM4/22/20
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Mark S. wrote:
"&@boat" when there was no "boat" tiddler.

HEY! Watch you language, young man!

<:-)

Sylvain Naudin

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Apr 22, 2020, 5:37:17 PM4/22/20
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Le mercredi 22 avril 2020 22:11:34 UTC+2, Jeremy Ruston a écrit :
* Maintain in a configuration tiddler a list of titles (or regexps) of tiddlers that should be excluded from autolinking. This would be far the easiest option to implement. One could still have an edit template segment that (say) displayed a checkbox for whether that particular tiddler should be autolinked


Personally I like this third option, since the main purpose of the plugin is to create links everywhere.

(it's a bit like the modification from Eric Shulman when he helped me to not display certain tags with an exclusion list).


Sylvain

Mark S.

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Apr 22, 2020, 6:10:20 PM4/22/20
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It's definitely been a while since anyone has called me that ...

springer

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Apr 22, 2020, 6:45:07 PM4/22/20
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Sylvain, it's already true that the target set of tiddlers (to which freelinks are made) can be restricted by some list condition (like having a certain tag). 

So the challenge here is specific to *uses* of a string that should generally be linked, but not in this instance.

Here's a better example than above: Suppose I have my last name as a tiddler, and want all mentions of me to point to that tiddler, but then I paste in some text that mentions a different Springer (the publisher, or the Jerry, egads). When I see that unwanted freelink show up, I need a quick edit to interrupt freelinking for just that instance.

One workaround (I'm using it now) is to paste a zero-width space into the middle of the word, like U+180E. This makes everything render correctly -- but at the expense of breaking whole-word searches and other data functions. 

-Springer

Pit.W.

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Apr 26, 2020, 4:12:09 AM4/26/20
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Observation

After upgrading to 5.1.22, codemirror editor shows unexpected behaviour: upon entering text, the editor window "jumps" (scrolls) to the top

Cure

After disabling the freelinks plugin the phenomenon disappeared

Can this be observed by others? Or is it a question of my working environment.

Pit.W




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Jeremy Ruston

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Apr 26, 2020, 5:12:53 AM4/26/20
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Hi Pit

I can't duplicate that problem with the prerelease, so perhaps it is something with your setup? Can you try to duplicate it with empty.html?

Best wishes

Jeremy

Pit.W.

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Apr 26, 2020, 6:16:12 AM4/26/20
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Yes, I can duplicate it with empty.

Interestingly the problem did not occur in my pre-upgrade file 5.1.21

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Mat

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Apr 26, 2020, 7:12:20 AM4/26/20
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Pit.W. wrote:

Yes, I can duplicate it with empty.


Even better if you can make it public, e.g via http://tiddlywiki5.tiddlyspot.com/ so people can test the exact same thing and hopefully (not) get different results.

<:-)
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