Styled Links In Obsidian

Linking your knowledge is the key to a well-organized academic second-brain system. However, Obsidian links are very simple and do not offer any customization, leaving room for a powerful improvement. Your browser, for instance, displays links you have visited in a different color, and websites display their links according to their design. In Obsidian, this system of “styled links” could make links appear different when linking to different sources or even access properties of your notes and tell something about the note before even clicking on it. I’ve used this powerful system for years, and in my webinars, this is one of the most recurring questions. So let’s see how to create smart, styled links in Obsidian.

First, let’s look at how to use this setup in your knowledge management system effectively. Here is an example of the same note with and without the styled links:

Notice how the passage becomes more readable because you can grasp the importance of links and what’s behind them using the colors. For example, yellow links always link to annotations inside PDFs and are used as a “backup” for an argument. I only click on them if I am double-checking my notes. Links prepended with a 📊 emoji, on the other hand, are links to figures (screenshots) and invite me to click on them to visualize the concept this note is about. I would always click on them when reading this note to get the full picture. There are more examples related to project management, as you can check out in the AKM course.

You will need two plugins to implement this system:

• Style Settings: A general-purpose plugin that is used by many other themes and plugins to customize appearance. Here we will define how different classes of links look.
• Supercharged Links: This plugin analyzes your links and classifies them. Once a link has been classified, Style Settings can assign an appearance to this class.

Structure your notes

In order for this system to work, you need to distinguish your different note classes by either:

• Putting notes of the same class into a specific folder (e.g., “Primary Sources” for all papers)
• Naming notes in a specific way (e.g., notes ending in “jpg” or beginning with “Figure…”)
• Adding a tag to this note type (this is the most flexible way)
• Adding specific properties to your notes.

We will look at the first two categories as the process is analogous for all other types. But you can find detailed introductions on how I use these notes in the note-taking course:

Defining the Classes for your styled links

First, we need to define what classes of links we want to distinguish. By default, every link is in the “default” class that will be styled according to the theme your Obsidian setup is using. The default theme renders default links in purple. After installing the two plugins above, navigate to Settings > Supercharged Links and create a “New Selector”:

The selector will now ask you to specify what constitutes a certain class (that you will later apply a style to). If you want all links to Image files to appear yellow, for example, you would need to specify a selector that “selects all files ending in .jpg”. If all your papers reside in a folder “Primary Sources”, you would need to specify that the path of your note contains “Primary Sources”. Here are the two examples:

These classes do not yet specify how the link looks. Only the classes themselves. Notice that for images, for example, you might need to create multiple courses, as an image can either end in “jpg” or “png” or “jpeg”. That is ok, as you can assign the same appearance to all of them later.

Once you have created a few classes, it’s time to move to the styling part.

Styling Links with Obsidian Style Settings Plugin

Next, you will navigate to the settings of the second plugin needed for this workflow: “Style Settings”. From the list in the settings, select “Supercharged Links”. Inside this list, you will find all your classes defined in the previous step. You can now customize the appearance of the links.

The options you can customize:

• Color of text and background as well as the weight of the font (e.g. bold)
• Adding texts before or after the link (often emojis).

In my case, above, I turn links blue and prepend them with a 📘 for all notes to papers.

Once you have saved your settings, your links will now appear in their new style and you are done!

How to Use Supercharged Links Effectively

You can be as creative as you want, as the system is very flexible. Here are some examples of settings that I use in my academic vault:

This system is especially useful if you combine it with the properties of the file. For example, I have notes on bigger tasks of my research and assign a “Completion” property to them that can be: Done, Open, Partial, or On Hold. Based on the value in the property of the task, its link will appear differently, indicating the state of the task. This allows you to create beautiful and automated to-do lists for your academic projects:

Summary

Links can be styled differently depending on the path or tag of the note or any of its attributes. This helps with identifying important links and structuring your academic knowledge and project management. Use the Supercharged links plugin to define these classes and the Style Settings plugin to change their appearance.