Cross-Linking in Drafts for a Wiki

Which is better? Drafts, Craft, Notion or Obsidian?

First in a series of posts to see which is the best option.

I seem to have a bit of a thing with note taking applications. My go-to application for getting text into my system is Drafts. Recently, a couple of updates ago Drafts gave us the option to create links between our drafts within the application. I downloaded a set of actions allowing linking one document to another. It kind of works, but it feels like an afterthought and could be a lot better. It doesn’t automatically create links back to the document you was linking from. There are other apps which do, do that. If you’re a student then you might have more of a need to deal with the data in a wiki style. When you’re making notes on a subject and you need to create a side note that’s more than just a comment creating wiki pages is the way to go. Let’s see what can be done inside Drafts.

Cross-Linking In Drafts

I downloaded this set of seven cross-linking actions from the Drafts and most of them work. Here is the list of the actions for cross-linking. (insert picture of these cross-linking draft actions)

Insert Link To Draft – If the title of the draft you’re linking to has the ## for a header two, the link is not recognised. it does work if the header a #, a header one in markdown.
Back Links – Doesn’t seem to do anything. Never gives up any back links. Might as well delete this action.
Open Last Draft – This will take you back to the previous draft. (handy because the previous action is broken)
New Linked Draft – Gives you an opportunity to make a new document and give it a name and tags.
Insert Workspace Link – Sometimes you don’t want to link to a document but to a workspace.
Setup Project – Sets up a page with a title of Table of Contents. Ready for you to add links pages/drafts of your project.
Autocomplete Cross-Link – If you know the title of the draft you want to link to you start typing two open square brackets and a couple of characters and it will search your drafts. Tap on Insert link and the link is made.

Good and Geeky Verdict on Cross-Linking with Drafts

If you’re all in with Drafts and you need to make this work, You’ll be okay. It isn’t pretty and isn’t particularly intuitive. Maybe you only need this type of cross linking once in a while. Why bother getting a new application and learning how to make it work, when you can do this in Drafts. There are other applications more suited to creating a wiki. Other applications to give you better looking notes. You’ll be able to have notes with images and WYSIWYG formatting. This important to us people who re visual learners. I respond to pages where the information is pretty as well as useful. Easier to commit to my memory. My preference is to keep Drafts as the application to start with text. Drafts is the application to capture your ideas in the form of words and decide later where you want to use them. Drafts is a brilliant application which is great for automation. I recommend you use one of these other applications if you really need to create a wiki.