Backlink

A backlink is an inbound link: the list of notes that link to the note you are reading, computed by the tool rather than written by hand.

A backlink is a link seen from the target’s side. If note A contains [[B]], then B has a backlink from A. Nobody writes backlinks; the tool scans every note for links and inverts the index, so each note can show who refers to it.

Origin

The idea is as old as hypertext, but wikis made it a standard feature. MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia, exposes it as “What links here” and keeps a dedicated pagelinks table so that the inverse lookup is cheap (MediaWiki Help:Links). Personal note tools adopted the same view once [[wikilinks]] became common in Markdown vaults; Obsidian’s backlinks plugin defines the term the same way and adds a second section for unlinked mentions, plain-text occurrences of the note’s name (Obsidian: Backlinks).

How it works

The tool keeps an index: for each note, the set of link targets it contains. Backlinks for note B are every note whose set contains B. The index must be rebuilt when a file changes, and title resolution happens first, so an ambiguous or misspelled link either lands on the wrong note or on none. A naive implementation compares every note against every other note; that is quadratic and shows up as a multi-second stall once a vault passes a few hundred files.

Pitfalls

Backlinks are only as good as link resolution. Unlinked mentions are a separate, more expensive feature, and few terminal tools offer it. Renaming a note without rewriting the links that point at it silently empties its backlink list. A backlink panel that lists titles without context tells you that a connection exists but not why, so tools differ in whether they show the linking paragraph.

In other tools

Obsidian shows linked and unlinked mentions in a sidebar tab, with optional surrounding context, and can render the list at the bottom of the note. Vimwiki has :VimwikiBacklinks, which searches all files of the current wiki for links to the current page (vimwiki docs). MediaWiki’s “What links here” is a special page rather than part of the article view.

In tnotes

tnotes builds the backlink index from the [[links]] in your files. In the TUI, alt+enter on a line without a link opens the backlinks overlay; the status bar shows ↩ N with the count, and the editor’s right-click menu has the same entry. Rows in the overlay are clickable.

Because renaming a note rewrites [[old title]] to [[new title]] everywhere, the list survives reorganising. The headless CLI returns the same data:

tnotes ls --json | jq '.[] | {id, backlinks}'

Version 1.3.0 replaced a quadratic backlink resolver in ls --json with a linear one (2 s down to 40 ms for 500 notes, per the changelog). Unlinked mentions are not indexed. See /docs/cli and /for/ai-agents.