Link Index

The link index is Tydora's background service, responsible for scanning the vault and building and maintaining the link relationships between all notes. It is the data foundation for 03-Knowledge-Management/01-Wiki-Links autocomplete, the 03-Knowledge-Management/03-Backlinks panel, the 03-Knowledge-Management/04-Knowledge-Graph, and 05-Navigation-Search/01-Quick-Open.

Abstract

You normally don't need to interact with the link index directly — it works silently in the background. This page explains its mechanism so you can understand why links "always resolve correctly".

Features

  • Automatically scans all notes in the vault
  • Builds an outlinks index: which notes the current note links to
  • Builds a backlinks index: which notes link to the current note
  • Builds a filename index: the mapping from filenames to paths (supporting [[Note Name]] resolution and autocomplete)
  • Supports incremental updates, avoiding repeated full scans

How It Works

Index Building

  1. Scans the entire vault on startup
  2. Parses all [[03-Knowledge-Management/01-Wiki-Links]] and ![[Embed]] in Markdown files
  3. Builds a bidirectional link relationship table

Incremental Updates

  • Watches filesystem changes (create / delete / rename / modify)
  • Updates only the link relationships of the affected files
  • When a file is renamed, attempts to update the links pointing to it so they do not break

Index Contents

Index type Description
Outlinks Which notes the current note links to
Backlinks Which notes link to the current note
Filename Filename → path mapping, supporting resolution and autocomplete

Performance Optimizations

  • Batch processing: processes at most 50 files at a time to avoid occupying the main thread all at once
  • Background async: index building runs in the background and does not block editing
  • Incremental first: everyday editing only triggers small-scale updates
Tip

With a very large vault, the initial index build on first startup may take a little time; afterwards it is always lightweight incremental updates.

Use Cases

The link index provides data for the following features: