Cheat and add links without backlinks

How To
1

Hi, I’d like to add a sneaky link between two Org Roam nodes, but without generating a backlink.

Is this possible? I notice that the id:... format does generate a backlink. Is it possible to override?

- [[id:744b12b2-b93c-4ad9-9fd1-5f649eac548f][Motivation: For the sake of advancing AI]]
2

Right now you can define your own link type, e.g. sneaky:uuid and handle them the same way IDs are, and they won’t show up in the backlinks buffer.

3

Great, thanks. Here’s my minimal implementation, which works as desired.

(require 'ol)
(org-add-link-type "xid" 'org-open-xid)
(defun org-open-xid (xid)
  (org-open-link-from-string (concat "id:" xid)))
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4

Just out of curiosity. For what kind of use do you need a link of this type “without backlink”?

5

One use case is inspired by interactive fiction:

I want to send people back to the beginning of the document to “play through” as another character, depending on what “ending” they wind up with. (If I allowed a backlink, this would be a spoiler!)

But, more generally, I might want to introduce “incidental” links that aren’t structurally important. There are many places where I say “as discussed in page such-and-such”, but without a link, because otherwise, everything would end up interrelated to everything else.

(This does suggest another question: could Org Roam Server be tweaked to support typed links in the graph? If that was possible, I could filter the graph by link type (x1id, x2id, and so on). That sounds like a fun project for a month of rainy Sundays.)

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6

Definitely possible, although we have yet to start exploring in this direction.

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