Support for internal links to other list items -> show text of target item

Hi,
I want to link from one list to an item from another list. This is already easy -> hitting “lc” and pasting the link works well.

What could be improved is the way this link is shown -> at the moment it shows the URL which is not very descriptive. Would it be possible that Checkvist recognizes that this is an internal link and shows the text of the item instead (and somehow (icon?) mark it as “internal link”)?

https://checkvist.com/checklists/somenumbers/tasks/anothernumber
isn’t as nice as: “tidy up the desk”

What do you think?

3 Likes

It would for certain be nicer.

With some work, you could use lnk: to paste in your link, and a more friendly description.

1 Like

Hi Jim,
thanks for your reply/hint.

You are absolutely right. The thing is that I do this multiple times a day and I would have to go through multiple steps each time (first copy the link, go to the other list, paste, go back to the previous list, copy the text, back to the other list and paste again). On the other side, this is something the App could do for me :wink:

I agree that this is already possible but not as “cool” as it could be.

Maybe another way to do this would be that “lc” also copies a “full link” into the clipboard (including the text for the link). This way a readable link could even be used in other applications aside from Checkvist. (But I am not sure if this would work and how easy it would be to build. -> Thats something the devs will know better.)

Thanks
Chris

1 Like

Hello folks, thanks for sharing your ideas.
We’d love to share something like this in this year :slight_smile:

Best,

2 Likes

Hello folks,

Please try how it works on https://beta.checkvist.com. The links should be parsed and replaced with their corresponding text. I.e.

  • link copy
  • paste the link (in another list as well)

– should be replaced with the text of the linked item when rendering.

How we should continue? We plan to rework this way list links as well (those which we insert with lst: shortcut). What else would you find most useful?

All the best,
KIR

3 Likes

Wow, thanks for this Christmas present :wink:

It works as a single entry, it works as a part of an item and it even works inside of notes.
Perfect :+1:

1 Like

It’s great that you work on links. I would also like to have the option of automatic link target description.

  • Conceptually, I would prefer a list: link and have Checkvist replace empty link descriptions with something appropriate; for internal Checkvist links, it would be the link target’s task description. This would let me have a different description if I want. (If I remember correctly, that’s the way this matter is designed in Confluence.)
  • For Checkvist internal links, I would prefer relative URLs. (So I don’t need to think if I LC on Checkvist beta or not.)
  • Observation: It seems that the URL’s list id is irrelevant. Not sure if it’s a good or bad thing – or irrelevant.

Thinking further – I want to mark up links depending on the link targets in my information environment.

  • E. g. I link to Confluence, Jira project X, Jira project Y, Jira Service Desk, Dropbox, Evernote web link, Evernote app link, Todoist, etc.).
  • Since links are an essential part of my interaction with different information resources – Checkvist in a mediator role – the visual appearance of the interacting resources would be a valuable feature.
  • … and it could already be done with custom CSS, but it’s a bit ugly. So maybe filling in empty link: descriptions might suffice, as noted in the beginning.

Side notes:

I like the update!

Similar to Ralf I would like description to be populated:

lc > lnk: > relative link is populated, description is blank - having the description filled in with the link target’s text would be nice

Relative links would be nice, since I mostly use the beta site, but occasionally use the main site (lnk: creates relative links).

However, neither relative nor absolute links translate to mobile.

  • relative links result in a 404
  • absolute links result in being taken out of the mobile site and ending up on a new tab in my regular mobile browser

Hello Ralf,

Thanks for the feedback! Please find my comments below.

Good idea, thanks! Will consider implementing it as well, I’ve added it to the link-related idea list :slight_smile:

If you paste the link as is, it should now ignore the host part, i.e. the hostname will be irrelevant and will be stripped out. I.e. you do lc, ctrl+V and you’re done.

True, to implement this rendering we had to make list ID in the URL irrelevant. Maybe we’ll implement alternative URLs, but so far it is not a high priority so far.

Another good idea, thanks. We already have some customized link rendering, which is mostly used when you insert links from Checkvist web-clipper, but it uses a specific link syntax. We could also add some detection of typical links, based on hostnames, CSS-based. And also pre-fill link description in Ctrl+K by trying to fetch inserted URL. Added this to improvements list.

If a link is created with an explicit markup, we probably will keep the original text of the link, specified by a user. The exception here is [list: links which are usually created by Checkvist and contain the target list name.

Actually, we support html ahref links, Markdown links, old custom [link: |] syntax and now simple paste of URL. We’ll try to make Checkvist link support smart enough to handle all of these, as we don’t want to break anyone’s list. Still, we’d add some smartness in this area.

This is the case which we should not process, so this is a bug. Hopefully, already should be fixed on beta.

Hope we’ve fixed this one as well, thanks!

All the best and thanks again,
KIR

Hello @ross,

Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks, you can use URLs regardless the host in this feature. As for the description pre-fill - we’ll consider this :slight_smile:

True. The mobile has a separate codebase and hasn’t been updated yet.

We also consider support such pre-rendering when exporting to Markdown/RTF, and also probably will consider it when filtering the list. This is yet to be thought out :slight_smile:

Thanks a lot!

Hello,

I’ve posted some news regarding further development of links, please check it out: Checkvist links development.

Best,
KIR

The work you’ve done with links/backlinks has been a really big productivity improvement for me. It’s great for example creating a daily agenda which consists of links to other tasks, and for things like a prioritized backlog of tasks.

Could there be an option which enables the same sort of task context you can enable for the Due page (the ‘sc’ command)? For the type of situations I mentioned above, it would really help to have that context since sometimes the individual tasks don’t contain much detail.

Hello @Aaron_Robinson,

Sorry for the delayed answer. So far we don’t quite see how we can add the ‘sc’ context when we show links, because a single list item may contain multiple links to other items. Also, “show context” is not relevant on a list page without links, so this option cannot be re-used from Due page.

We’d like to enable an experimental “mirror” mode for links to other items, when a list item contain solely the link. In fact, we partially implemented this for tags, i.e. tags of the linked item can be seen near the link.

Right now, you can see the context of the linked item when you mouseover a link. No keyboard support yet - could not figure out an appropriate shortcut for this. Suggestions are welcome.

Thank you and best regards,
KIR

Thanks for the response, no problem with the delay and hope you are doing well.

I didn’t even realize you could have multiple links in a single list item! I can see why that prevents ‘show context’ from making much sense there. Since posting, I found a work-around which works pretty well – by organizing the links themselves into a hierarchy with enough context.

Capture

1 Like

Hi, quite a clever solution :slight_smile:

Stay safe,
KIR